I just finished inside and wanted to see how people felt about it in 2023. Everything I’ve read about it around 2016-2017 seems to regard it as the best game of the year and in some cases one of the best of all time. It’s this truly still the consensus?
I thought it was great, and I’m glad I have only picked it up recently. Games like Inside are the reason why I think comparing games only makes sense to a limited degree. It’s a great game, very inquire, soooo enjoyable. But it’s also short, and that’s probably a good thing? Is it better than TOTK? I wouldn’t even know where to start on that question. It’s not worse, it’s just different.
The same conversation Limbo started to kick off when they released that back in the day. Quite short, but when you enjoy each moment that much, how can you attempt to assign a dollar to hour value? You just can’t always diminish it to something that simple.
In terms of saying whether it’s “the best of all time”, well, it could certainly be one of the best of all time, but you really can’t put it in front of or beside games doing radically different things. Youd have to start making a few wide umbrellas of games to place together and then rank them from there. Perhaps something like Unravel would be more comparable with something like Inside or Limbo.
I’d argue it’s worse than TOTK. I completely get your point that they’re wildly different, but INSIDE doesn’t feel as overall “fun” to me at any point as BOTW or TOTK. I think there was only one real flaw with INSIDE; the way in which you solve puzzles can be sort of tedious. One thing I really liked about The Witness was that, despite the fact that some things were hidden or convoluted, it was rarely a stupid long walk just to complete the puzzle. INSIDE featured that a number of times. Sometimes the puzzle’s solution was obvious, but I was still running around for minutes just doing the legwork. I feel there should be instant gratification for the puzzle’s solutions, sometimes solving them didn’t even feel good because I had spent too long trying to actually get the game to recognize I had completed the puzzle even though I had figured it out
I liked the story, it really drove the game forward but the gameplay was repetitive fast. I got old of it far quicker than I did when I played limbo.
Comparing games is like comparing movies. I think for the most part it works when you compare segments and styles rather than just whole games. Like I felt portal while also a short one mechanic game, that mechanic had a less tedious feeling towards the end. Probably due to the uniqueness of the mechanic at the time.