I am 32 years old.

My ex-wife and I have a daughter together, and we adopted our son together. Both are now 4 years old.

When we were going through our separation, I felt lost and unhappy. I was self-destructive. One day, I was so angry with everything spiraling out of control that I punched a concrete wall in a moment of overwhelming emotion. This resulted in breaking my fifth metacarpal in my right hand—the hand I worked with, played games with, and used to carry my children to bed—the hand I desperately needed to ensure I could continue providing.

Upon learning the severity of the self-inflicted damage, I became almost suicidal. Keep in mind that just a few months before this, I was the happiest man, with no history of depression or anxiety. I had never experienced anger outbursts, nor was I the type to break down and cry, but I was in a tough situation that truly prevented me from seeing the light on the other side.

With nothing better to do, I looked for a game I could play WITH ONE HAND while recovering. Somehow, I stumbled upon this game and read some of the comments. I decided it was worth a try... I must admit I didn't beat the game, nor did I play as much as some of you. In fact, I may have played this game for only a day or two. That being said, after doing so, I had a new joy and hope for life. I managed to leave behind the pain and suffering that had been thrust upon me. I could experience the joy and happiness of other people. I relaxed for 5 ♥♥♥♥ minutes listening to this music, long enough to realize that I would be okay.

After realizing this, I turned off the game and went back to work. My hand hurt a lot, but I was motivated. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and became the father I needed to be at that moment, not the weak boy I was behaving like.

Today, I am close friends with the mother of my children. We don't fight, argue, or say hurtful things to each other. We are parents and friends.

Now I have 3 children. My third child is, wait, ALSO 4 YEARS OLD. The woman I am with was going through a very similar situation at the time of my separation, and we just unexpectedly stumbled into each other's lives. We have been dating for a year and are very happy together.

Moral of the story: you never know what life has in store for you, and if I had given up when all odds were against me, I wouldn't be where I am today. This silly little game helped me realize that.

Thank you.

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It's a short game with some decent puzzle mechanics. There's not much of a story or any horror elements really. It's a mediocre platformer with a sudden spike in difficulty, I don't have much else to say. 4/10 not worth 5$ maybe get it on a sale

The Inner Darkness is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. Some effort went into this one, as it uses a phasing technique that only about 40-50 other retro pixel platformer shovelware games on Steam use. Effort also went into creating a somewhat dark narrative about the protagonist having a gut wound (I certainly feel like I've got a gut wound every time I play GameMaker Studio platformer template copy + pastes like this), all of which was wasted with the old construction kit "Look I filled out a template and that makes me a developer" laziness. One step above RPG Maker, I guess. Regardless, little to no value as a PC game for PC gamers, so let's go into the laundry list of defects.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. To make matters worse, there's no mouse input, despite this being sold on PC as if it were a PC game. This is unacceptable and somewhat insulting to PC gamers. It's a good demonstration of the poor attitude the developer has towards PC gamers, and this attitude has resulted in yet another defect in this game.

While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this game was never accepted on the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.

A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Nauris Amatnieks has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only appears around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

The Inner Darkness has the completely unrealistic cash grab price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.

Nice art, a few decent puzzles, simple controls that feel pretty organic. I just can't recommend the game at the price tag. Pick it up if it's on sale and you want to spend an hour enjoying a unique little platformer.

PROS:
* Nice pixel art.
* Simple but decent game mechanics.
* The story is cheesy but okay.

CONS:
* Running is mapped to the worst button on XBOX controller (bumper) and cannot be remapped.
* Huge difficulty spike at the end.
* Very short (60 minutes to complete).

Overall, it's a good platformer, but nothing special. Considering its length, it's quite overpriced.

A nice and short puzzle game.

A fairly easy, short puzzle platformer with a dimension-shifting mechanic. Its gameplay is sometimes annoying, with various areas being a bit of a pain in the ass to complete. Adding to the frustration is how it puts you to the beginning of the area when you fail. There were some times when I was just happy to have something out of my way. But those areas are very few and far in between. For the most part, it does its job quite well.

I rather enjoyed my hour with this, though it wasn't five dollars' worth of enjoyment. I would only recommend it on sale. But with that said, I do recommend it. Especially to those who like playing puzzle platformers with simplistic pixel graphics.

I must give the game it's dues. It really uses as much of its limited mechanics as it can without ever really overstaying its welcome (as you can see, the whole thing took only slightly more than an hour to beat, playing suboptimally). Even a couple of core mechanics which I feared would become annoying never became so, they just added a slight illusion of urgency.

The puzzles were on the easy side, with more than a few times me overthinking what they needed, but several did feel clever enough (even if they were never particularly lateral). A few of them did easily screw you over due to movement rather than misunderstanding the core puzzle, but that was partially on me for rushing.

The "purely" platforming sections is where things got a bit jankier at times, but nothing unsurmountable. The worst thing I can say about them is that sometimes the dimension switching had you collide into spikes you didn't know were there, a fortunately infrequent occurence in a world with little penalty for death thanks to the generous checkpoints.

So anyways, what went wrong which pushed me, an usual review optimist, into negative recommendation territory? Well, the plot. Without spoiling anything specific, it's cliche in terms of indie game story, but that is not why. Various elements presented throughout felt unresolved (I guess they were symbolic?), and the climax (and subsequent ending one short room afterwards) came practically out of nowhere after a couple of setpiece rooms, the latter of which had a one-off gimmick which worked so-so (it felt good when it worked, but you had to figure out the slightly changed controls so that led to multiple deaths and repetition). It's not a bad story per se, but for a story driven game my expectations were cut and I was left fundamentally unsatisfied with the conclusion of the whole experience.

P.S. If you wonder why the previous two platformers I've reviewed this month, which I ostentibly criticized more, did get recommendations, it's because I feel they better fulfilled what they wanted to do and what they presented to the player, so my gut pointed me towards a positive. Or maybe they're just cute and that won me over? I'm unsure about the last point.

Very nice piece, I really recommend it. Nice game design, challenging gameplay. Length (about 2 hours) is ok.