I finally Understood Inside
Yes, I know I'm late to the party, but you know what I mean. When I first played this thing, I was still at the stage where, for me, everything had the same level of secrets as Five Nights at Freddy's and Gravity Falls. Even if this wasn't the case for some products, it still had certain mysteries, like Undertale, which is why I became so obsessed with the idea of finding hidden details or symbolism where you really didn't have to overthink things.
Inside was one of those games that suffered from this treatment from me, mainly because the first time I played it, I expected something much bigger to be revealed at the end than what I was imagining, and all my expectations were shattered. But the truth is, the game is short, simple, fast, and tells a fairly simple story; beyond that, everything else is just world-building. But what's more, they didn't even think of it that way.
So this post will be less of a theory analysis and more of a way to bring two pieces down to earth to try and settle all the doubts I had before playing Playdead's Inside, not for the second but for the third time.
1: The protagonist
The game comes from this trend that happened a few years ago in which games like Limbo, Inside and the first Little Nightmares began to resonate in the indie community, and while I must say that this game still retains a certain fragment of it, the truth is that to say that the child is truly the protagonist would be condescending; the protagonist is the monster, or at least the more amorphous being we see at the end of the game.
The secret ending reveals that if we disconnect the generators along their path, the child simply freezes, as if he has no further commands, just like one of the workers. This is because the entire route we take in the game is guided by the generators we find; disconnecting them all eliminates the monster's ability to maintain the mental connection to control the child, hence the game's simple second ending.
This is because apparently the monster is what generates all the mind control in this society. We see workers who have been directly fined or who were born this way, who are mind-controlled to perform different activities, and their obedience is also evaluated. All of this is thanks to the monster we see at the end, which is connected to different mind-control helmets around the facility. Even if we don't have a mind-control helmet, the workers will still follow us when we are escaping from the facility.
In fact, it's very likely that the parasites we find with the pigs at the beginning of the game have something to do with the idea of how these people are controlled, not only because the parasite itself controlled the pig that attacks us in the game, but also because on several occasions at the end, when the creature crashes to the ground, pieces of flesh detach from it and continue moving, very similar to parasites. Therefore, this suggests that the parasites are directly bio-ingenerated; that is, they are not natural, they are not a plague, they are part of the system of mind control.
The game is called Inside because the creature is trapped inside the complex; we need to get out. Therefore, we use a child for all of this. The child, for some reason, appears with the game menu out of nowhere, as if we were just beginning to gain mental control of it. All of this also helps so that once we arrive at the facility, the child is absorbed by the creature, and subsequently, we control it. As I said, the child is not the protagonist; the monster is. They want to be free.
Regarding that diagram showing the facilities that Spode us with, I associate the normal ending of the game with simply a model of the facilities. We can see that we're embedded in a mountain, so it wouldn't surprise me if the model was just that, a kind of structuring tool, like the ones architects use.
2: The system
The entire system we see in the game consists of mind-controlled labor. The only humans we see who have no control over their consciousness are those who are controlling us or trying to prevent us from reaching our destination. I don't know if there's any symbolism with the child that tells everyone else he's actually autonomous. It's most likely because they barely see us and everyone tries to smother us as if they're afraid we'll reach our destination. But other than that, I'm not sure what else to say. You could interpret this as a huge analogy for the social class system, but at this point, that's not even a message; it's a cliché.
What does catch my attention are two small parts of the game that reveal a bit about how this system works on a large scale. First, we have the part where the boy is entering the facility. We can see another boy accompanying an adult; he doesn't react, but he doesn't look like a slave either, but rather like a normal person. He's even dressed the same way as the oppressors there, who most likely are simply going to show him how everything is going on. In other words, it's not a secret organization or some kind of ultimate survival method that no one will trust; it's normal, and the children, or at least this one, are taught how things are supposed to be done.
Later in the facility, we can also observe numerous experiments on humanoids with varying proportions. Sometimes they are missing arms, other times their heads, but they already have crooked heads, growing from a shoulder. Other times they are a kind of elongated man, and so on. It is thanks to this that we can infer that what we are using as slaves were never truly human, but were created in the same way, and we can also observe this. Thanks to the containers that manipulate the water's gravity in the facility—that is, this is how they are created—it is a kind of genetic creation method, but much less sophisticated. We can even see some of them having spasms like babies.
Of course, the question of where the child came from also arises here, because the child is perhaps the only part of the game that remains unanswered. He doesn't dress like any of the others, nor does he resemble one of the workers we mind-control, since most of them appear to be adults. We also don't observe any similarities or distinguishing features that set him apart from the others; he's simply a child in a red shirt. So, most likely, there are two possibilities: either he was a normal child who was mind-controlled, or he was a child who escaped before the process was completed. And the evidence for this lies in the aquatic girls.
The aquatic girls, or as I like to call them, the "La Pelos," are girls found underwater who initially try to pull us under. I was thinking—at least that was the impression I got the first time I played—that one of these girls was actually helping us by allowing us to breathe underwater. However, after playing the game for the third time, I realize that all that really happened is that the girl left us alone. Or at least, the boy's corpse was connected to one of these mind-control helmets that was anchored to the boy's abdomen and subsequently gave him the ability to breathe underwater. We can also observe how the girls are subjected to similar processes, like slaves, of course, though not the same methods. This is because we can also see the monster at the end of the game breathe underwater. Therefore, it's understood that all the processes we've been seeing throughout the games are to keep the creature stable.
However, we can also observe how the girls have their own autonomy; it's not as if they're part of the enslavers' system, but neither are they under the monster's control. They can't be mentally controlled in any way, and therefore, my strongest intuition is that they are girls who survived, at least because their facilities were abandoned due to the flooding we see in the scene where they appear. They simply began to develop this kind of autonomy, and I can further say that they depend exclusively on the water because when we leave it, they don't even try to jump out to beat us; they didn't stay on the shore.
3: The meaning
As I said, Inside is a very strange game, but it really wasn't as difficult to understand as my teenage self had imagined. It's simply a creature that wants to escape its captors, and that's it. Now, the reason it stays near the shore and remains motionless until the end of the game is simple: most likely, despite all the physical punishment we had received during the escape, the poor creature was about to die. At least it had enough strength to reach the point where it could see the light of day before dying, since, if you think about it, the sun hadn't been seen at all during the entire game.
There's a part that also interests me about how three scientists seem to be helping you escape. But this is actually a trap. They're simply leading you to a water tank where they intended to keep you contained, which didn't work. However, they still seemed confident enough to say that at least this creature wouldn't get out. They probably didn't even have any idea it would end up escaping, but it's not like they were bothered by the physical punishment this thing received; it's painful enough to hear about. So seeing it not even trying to get up from the ground and just resting in the sunlight is cathartic. It's at least understanding that the objective was achieved. Meanwhile, in the hidden ending, which could now be argued as the bad ending, the child, who seems to have some autonomy, decides to ignore the creature and disconnects all forms of mind control.
Why do I say the child has its own autonomy? Simple. Because to find these secrets, we have to go to places where it wouldn't be logical for the creature to maintain its rhythm, that is, the rhythm and line of the base game. It is from there that the child gains its autonomy, reaching areas where it hasn't been ordered, that the creature gradually loses control. Without going any further, you need to eliminate all the generators you find throughout the game to unlock the secret ending.
With that said, it's clear that the whole theme surrounding the game is simply control, or at least mind control and freedom, and beyond that, there's nothing more to it. Although it seems a bit deeper than it appears, and I feel that's only in its presentation, it's a very unique game. When I went back to play it, now that I understand the programming and animation details, I realize the mastery with which this thing is made. There are very fluid animations, where other actions don't even appear to be programmed; it seems as if they're happening due to last-minute decisions. And others don't even seem like animations of constant death; it's simply the way the characters react that's strange to watch. But anyway, I don't think it's that profound. Beyond that, it has a beautiful message about freedom, slavery, choice, and a creature that wants to spend its last moments in the sunlight.
How humanity got to this point is something I honestly don't care about, at least. It's understood that they create slaves, they are the ones who maintain mind control and giant creatures, since they also maintain mind control. They keep the creature attached to the water tank, the creature escapes and suddenly everyone disappears. And we know that creature, simply because we can see how animals with less mental capacity, like fish or chicks, follow the child. The child, who we also know has the ability to connect to helmets and make a slave connect to another helmet to control another slave, that is, it is the enormous mental capacity that this creature has to be able to do all this. At the end of the day, it was all just that: an escape, trying to get out of suppression.
Of course, the fun thing about these games is that you can draw different kinds of interpretations. This simplest interpretation might be correct, or it might not. There might actually be details we didn't notice, details the developer didn't think were important enough. But putting that aside, I think many YouTubers who made theories back then exaggerated quite a bit about what this game could be hiding. I think it was simply that: an escape room story. And honestly, after playing it again, I understand why I liked it so much back then, and even today I can still appreciate it for what it is: an excellent video game.
