I may have a man-crush on the developer, Nauris Amatnieks. Of his games I've played -- There Was a Caveman, Moustache Mountain, this -- they've all been beautiful platformers, with solid, fun gameplay held back by mediocre level design, throwaway writing, and abysmal music.

The Inner Darkness is no different. It's not a great game -- it barely scratches the surface of decent -- but it feels good to play and has a certain charm to it. You play a man with a gut injury, waking up in a strange, diseased world. You have one ability: Shifting the world around you between this world of disease, and a cured world. Some things change between these worlds -- spike traps and boxes appear and disappear, propelling 'fans' shift their air currents -- and you find yourself having to act quickly to solve some of these puzzles.

The whole game lasts a brief ~40 minutes, and feels incomplete. E.g., there's also an odd, 20-second section with unique mechanics where you slide down a mountain, jumping over flesh mounds and even shifting between realities a single time. This part was so brief it felt like an abandoned afterthought. It's *good* though, making it all the more out of place.

All the while your guy comments *non-stop* on the surreality of this new world (and his gored tum-tum), often with little evident proof-reading. The narrative is shallow and uninteresting, with a twist ending visible from the first minute of gameplay.

And yet I still really enjoyed it. Nauris' games are rusty, but there's a lot of charm here, and he's showing pretty notable improvement between his games. And boy, he really goes all out on his art, which is worth supporting by itself.

Follow the cute stinker on Twitter or Patreon (@namatnieks), where he posts a number of pixel art tutorials and asset packs and says silly things.

I just can't really recommend this game. It's a great concept, but it really feels like a demo shined off and put up on the store to make some extra cash. I mean, it is exactly that, and while that isn't a bad thing in itself, I really can't recommend this game for full price ($5).

Maybe if it was twice as long (as in, an hour or two compared to 30 - 40 mins), maybe if it had a couple more mechanics, maybe if the developer did more with the theme, but in it's current state, I just can't suggest picking it up.

I enjoyed it, I just wish there was more to it.

Is this game a masterpiece? Absolutely not, it is just a nice indie game I enjoyed.

Just finished it - with over 7h playtime. Haven't all the reviewers said it is a short game? Oh well, probably I am just a bad gamer.

Anyway, this is not an adventure, has not much of a story, and is just a simple puzzle platformer with crate pushing. Steams screenshot feature did not work, nor my XBox One controller. The XBox 360 controller worked fine, though.

Good game, always keeps the player moving forward and introducing new challenges just when I'm getting bored of the game. Dialogue is a bit bland, but overall does a good job of keeping the player intrigued.

Downside, I beat the game in 40 minutes and it has no replay-ability.
Overall I recommend it, but nowhere near it's current price tag.
This feels like a free demo.

I wouldn't say the video or description is misleading, but this game didn't turn out to be what I was expecting. I thought this would be a game overflowing with horror elements, monsters that needed to be avoided, and really get my heart racing. However, it's much more laid-back and calm than I had anticipated. So, for anyone who'd be on the edge of their seat about a monster lunging out or the game plunging into a nightmare realm, nothing like that happens. There are obstacles, ways to die, and some surprises, yet it's all pretty tame.


• Although the game wasn't the horror-fest I was expecting, it's environment and atmosphere is eerie enough to keep up some tension. And despite not having any enemies to speak of, there are a few sections where the player has to run away from an impending force.
• I would admit that I've never seen a control scheme expressed solely through a color-coded chart before. It took me a minute to figure out, but it's effective, and there's multiple ways to control the character. I had no issues with unresponsive controls in the game.
• The way the protagonist responds to his environment with quickly flowing text works well, conveying some of the story without disrupting the gameplay.
• The pixelated graphics are very well done; everything looks sharp and crisp, aside from the globs and blobs, of course.
• The sprint and dimension-switching meter is rather generous.


• I thought the various items and events in the game were going to have a larger meaning, but most of it was just a distraction. I expected the stroller to be really meaningful especially, but it didn't mean anything.
• The protagonist's reactions seemed rather subdued considering his situation. Maybe if he remarked about having a sense of being in a dreamlike state that'd be one thing, but his responses are rather bland.
• There's some ambient music and sound effects, but the game is a bit too quiet. It does make sense story-wise, yet with nothing telegraphed to the player earlier it makes the game seem too empty.
• The ending cutscene takes place in a remarkably large, open room based on where the protagonist is supposed to be. I really hate that he doesn't say a word either, at such a crucial moment.
• This is a surprisingly short game. I finished it in under an hour, as I'm sure most people would. Someone could get stuck for a while, but there's not much content.
• I had no sense of how far along in the game I was getting. It doesn't convey at all that you're making progress or are nearing your goal.


• When you're sliding down the slope and have to jump over the obstacles, you can lean forwards and backwards to speed up or slow down your descent. I didn't know that, thinking I had to rely on timing my jumps alone to pass it, and was getting really mad because it was so precise and difficult. Once I realized I could lean, I beat it my next attempt. This section is right near the end of the game.


I do list several criticisms in this game, as I think it could have been done better. However, my complaints don't include gross mistakes or anything game-ruining. My largest issue would be how short the game is, and the asking price. A game with less than an hour of content is by no means worth $5. If you get it from a bundle, I think the game is worth a playthrough because it was competently made. With nothing groundbreaking though, it's not worth picking up unless it's for cheap.

It's rare that I end up with a game I enjoy that I can't recommend. Usually it's the opposite, I'll have a game that I don't personally enjoy or have problems with but recognize that it has enough merits to get by. I wish that was the case with The Inner Darkness, but in the final analysis I just couldn't find enough to support it. It has all the parts I love about indie games, the platforming and the pixels, but they don't come together to form a very satisfying experience.

Your little dude wakes up in a darkened field, at the center of some shadow world of black trees and meat tendrils. He doesn't know the how's or why's of any of it but he's got a bleeding stomach wound and he needs help. Fortunately that doesn't impede his jumping and sprinting, and after some perfunctory platforming he finds he can flip between the evil meat world and sunny pastoral world. There are key differences between the two (besides the ambiance) that will help him overcome the obstacles he'll face, and along the way he'll find strange clues to the overarching mystery of his surroundings and his condition.

I'll be blunt: you've heard this story before. Your chatty little dude will muse at every tentacle and light fixture in ways that will be familiar to players of indie offerings, and the twist at the end is one that a hundred games have already had their way with. It's not a bad story, definitely not for a game as small in scope as this, and I even appreciate your character's lines for the most part. But it cuts right to the core of my problem with this game, which is that it doesn't offer anything you haven't seen before. You can absolutely get tired of good stories, and I am absolutely tired of this one.

The platforming to see said story through is only a few days fresher than the narrative. Dimension-flipping is at the heart of the puzzles, with bridges only appearing in the sunny world, meat blocks only in the meat world, and spikes sprinkled liberally between the two. You'll have blocks to push to get over tall walls, you'll have mid-air dimension-flips to execute over platforms, you'll have gravity-flipping orbs to fiddle with, and so on. The challenges get a little taxing by the end and there is one change of pace segment to be found there as well, but again, it's a very familiar puzzle platformer. You push one crate, you've pushed them all.

None of this is really enough to sink the game, but the length might do it. The Inner World is only going to last you about 40 minutes, slightly longer if you get stuck on any of the puzzles. That's a scarce amount of platforming across what I'd call three major areas, with only two environments between them. I like the pixel art well enough but that doesn't leave much variety to appreciate, and there's nothing besides the trek to the end. No power-ups, no collectibles, no secrets, nothing.

I gave this one a chance, I really did, but the deciding factor was probably a random hard crash near the end that forced me to reboot my PC. For such a short, baseline experience, any kind of instability is just unacceptable. Then again, maybe it was how mundane it all was. In a perfect vacuum, The Inner World is a fine little game. But we don't live in a perfect vacuum, we live in the reality where there are 1,579 other platformers to play on Steam, and probably more than that by the time I post this review. At least some of those have done what this game does better, and while I appreciate the simplicity of this title, I can't honestly recommend it to anyone in light of the other options out there.



Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them at https://goldplatedgames.com/ or on my curation page!

These are the hardest sort of games to review; there's nothing wrong with this game - it's OK, I had a decent enough time playing it, but it doesn't do anything special. The art design is good, but it uses the same assets far too often. The gameplay is good, but it doesn't have a lot of variety or challenge. The story has potential but never does anything with that potential - the ending is pretty much exactly what you'd expect, and there's no explanation for the metaphor of the gameplay.

In the end, I have to go with a No on this game just because I will have forgotten it by tomorrow. If you just want a cheap platformer with a fun horror aesthetic to kill a little time, though, you could still definitely do worse.

Interesting game but very basic and short for a 5 dollar price tag, Eversion is the same price and its about twice as long as this and more interesting, id suggest play that instead or buy this when its on sale.

It was an alright game, but I didn't find myself enjoying it much. The story felt lackluster, and I probably won't play through it again any time soon. Pick it up if you want a small, decent platformer, but wait until there's a sale.

The controls are buggy and terrible, the story is lazy and very obvious (it's exactly what you'd guess after the intro sequence finished), the theme looks good but it's entirely cosmetic but it gets old before the end, the puzzles are way too easy and hampered by the buggy controls, the protagonist's lack of personality and constant exclamations of credulity get very annoying really fast. Overall it's bad as a puzzle game and bad as a horror game.

This is said to be a "short story-focused 2d action/puzzle platformer". Yes, it's short. I'd say too short but I was bored of it well before the end. If you claim "story-focused" then either it's a false statement or an admission that everything else was neglected. Either way it's damning because the story is virtually non-existent and it was mostly confined to the intro and outro. Technically it's not even 2d, because you have an extra dimention. THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT DAMNIT! How you can call this "action" is beyond me. This goes dangerously close to false advertising. The "puzzle" and "platformer" parts are true, the game is just very bad at both.