Story of INSIDE Explained

If you have just played INSIDE and are completely blown away and are like "wow ... what did I just play", then you're not alone! I just spent quite a bit of time peicing together an explanation to what we all have just played, and I would like to show it to you. So if you have some time, and some questions, read through this wonderful guide for understanding what you've just played!

Introduction

At this moment, the game INSIDE is pretty new, so there isn’t much out there on theories on what the game is actually about. The story was left intentionally vague, leaving most of us confused about what the story actually was.

BUT FOR NO LONGER!

I will be telling you my theory of the game which was created by looking over every little detail of the game mixed a little (a lot) inference! I will go through different concepts inside the game as well as the story itself, so hold onto your socks as there will be a lot to cover!

Warning #1

[color=#C82828]There will be SPOILERS below, so if you haven’t played this game to completion, I highly suggest you do that before reading this![/color]

Warning #2

[color=#C82828]This is MY take on the concepts, ideas, and story told throughout the game, so this might not be 100% spot on, but it’s the best I can come up with.[/color]

Vocabulary

I use vocabulary that are not the official terms. Here is a list of my terms and their image so you don't get confused.

• Zombie
  A person that has been brainwashed and can be controlled by the mind control helment.
  
  
  
• Pleb
  A pink fleshy humanoid in which was grown for experimental purposes. The name is a shortened version of the word Plebeian which is a lowerclass commoner in Ancient Rome.
  
  
  
• Pleb Boss
  The Pleb Boss, or Pleb King, is a hive mind mass of what appears to be pleb flesh. Its main goal in society is to command the vast numbers of zombies in complex tasks that no human could do.
  
  
  
• Siren
  A Siren is a creature resembling a young girl who lives in the vast corridors of the flooded city. They are reclusive individuals who attempt to drown anyone who disturbs them. They have gained the ability to breath underwater but have lost the ability to survive on land.
  
  
  
• Achievement Spheres
  Achievement Spheres are metallic objects found throughout the game that are used to power certain areas throughout the city. Upon pulling out the radio-isotope containing core, it malfunctions and grants you an achievement.
  

Story

I think it’s pretty safe to say that the world is in pretty much in mid to late apocalypse. The world is seemingly lacking the population density compared to today, making it seem that the world has lost a fair amount of its people. Meat production is also dwindling as pigs, and presumably other animals, are dying off in mass quantities.

This die-off seems to be caused by this parasitic worm pictured on the right.These worms most likely live in the intestines and feed off of the food that the animals eat. The worms eat the food before the intestines can absorb the nutrients and the animals basically starve to death. After death, the worm eats the corpse of the body. These worms seem to affect mainly large mammals as they can infect humans as well. Birds are seemingly unaffected as they look to be as healthy or even healthier than today. This worm is probably much more invasive than you think, most of these types of worms are pretty easy to cure, but since everything is either dying or dead, this is obviously not the case. Removing them while keeping the host alive is probably impossible, for whatever reason, they are not able to be removed and are most likely a death sentence if you end up getting them.


This story also takes place pretty far in the future, at least far enough where huge trees can grow in industrialized areas and where the ground can become so saturated with water that building are sinking into the ground(hence the hugely angled buildings). In this world, neural science had become much more advanced than today, and since neurology is a fairly new science at this point in time, it’s fair to assume that it would take a long time of innovation in order to make such devices as seen in the game.

The city that the main protagonist enters into is heavily flooded, whole skyscrapers are fully submerged and a lot of the game has you venture through these flooded cityscapes. Why the city is flooded is largely unknown, and may stay that way, though the most likely answer to this problem is that during the fall of man, when everything was going to hell, a nearby large body of water increased dramatically in size, and since society was collapsing, people had to focus on not dying rather than preventing the increase in water levels and the flooding of the city. Most people probably evacuated which also helps explain why the streets are so empty.

Now that the city is evacuated, there is a group that had chosen to stay behind. These people have set up a huge perimeter around the outskirts of the city and are intent on keeping others out, probably to keep anyone who is infected from infecting the central citizens. The people in the core of the city are most likely uninfected and seem to work on creating some sort of cure to the parasite ravaging the world.

(Now I’m shoving a lot of information down your throat at once, and it might not make sense at the current moment, but once everything is explained, it will hopefully fit together quite well. So just hold on)

Let’s start off with why I think there is a difference between the outskirts people and the inner people. The people patrolling the outskirts wear masks, presumably to hide their identity. This is the main reason that first brought their differences to my attention.


(It may be hard to see, but if you look closely you can see the mask)

At first I thought that hiding their identity was the only reason they wore the masks, these people are brainwashing, kidnapping, and choking out little kids, of course they don’t want their identity to be revealed. I thought this until later on in the game where you fall into a line of zombies and need to blend in in order not to be caught.



As you can see, these are normal people pictured here, ones with children and even an infant. And they all wear masks. These masks they wear don’t just hide their identity, they mean something else as well, and this is why I think they’re different then the people in the center. I think these people are infected or at least risking getting infected in order to protect the central people. This idea is also backed up later in the game as well by the fact that there are a lack of people between them and the center people. After you leave this area and continue on your journey to the Pleb Boss, there is a huge area void of people apart from the sirens that inhabit most of the waters. The masked citizens protect the border of the city so no infected people get in, and then stay far away from the others so that they don’t unintentionally infect them. Once someone is infected or if they want to help on the outskirts, they are migrated to the outer city. As you can see below, not one of the inner city people has a mask on.



Surrounding the inner city is this huge desolate area in which immense explosives are detonated. These immensely powerful explosives are probably meant to kill anyone trying to enter the city as they rip you to shreds if you aren’t in cover when the shockwave hits you. After detonation, the shockwave takes ~0.766 seconds to reach you, meaning the explosives were detonated 262.738 meters away if the shockwaves are traveling the speed of sound. This doesn’t seem to be the case, as it looks much farther than 262 meters, meaning that these waves are traveling supersonic in order to reach the player. Another thing to point out is that the material cost to produce and detonate explosives this frequently is immense, so these shockwaves are most likely not made by explosives. The people within the city have probably developed a device that radiates a huge amount of energy in a very short amount of time, like one really big capacitor discharging. If it heats the air around the device fast enough, the air will expand, creating a shockwave just like an explosive, the light emitted would be from the electrons in the atoms dropping energy levels after being excited by such large amounts of energy.



After this shockwave area, there are no facemask wearing people, at first I though the two shown below were wearing facemasks, but after closer examination, it turns out that they aren’t.




There are a few zombies within the inner city, but they are held behind pretty strong doors and have probably beem heavily screened to come this far within the city.

Location

For whatever reason, I decided to look into the location of where the story takes place. Even though it doesn't help in understanding the story, it is nice to think that it takes place somewhere in the world. To start the search off, I looked at two things that were present in the near beginning, pigs, and corn.


Now, pigs are very useful to base this search off of since they are more prevalent in some areas of the world than others as you can see by the map below. The main areas of interest are the Midwest of the United States, central Europe, and Eastern China. This already narrows it down quite a bit from the whole world, to three distinct locations.



After that, I looked at a map of where Maize is grown around the world, though it didn’t really add any new information to the mix, it did highlight the three main areas mentioned above.



Flora could also be used to identify where a location was since not all trees grow everywhere in the world, but this was entirely reliant that the developers paid attention and actually assigned a location to this story and just didn't tell us. I started at the very beginning and I looked for clearly imaged leaves on trees and I almost immediately saw some (top right of the bottom image).



From there, I looked through the book, Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees, and found a very similar tree, the Southern Catalpa. The leaves look nearly identical and the tree viewed in the game shows similar shape and branch structure to a fairly young Southern Catalpa.




Though native to the South East United States, it has since spread to the majority of the US. This eliminates 2 out of the 3 other options (Europe and China), this mixed with the data from pig farms and maize fields makes the Midwest United States the only other option.



This is good and all, but we can shrink the search area down even farther. At the end of the game, the Pleb Boss lies on the coast of a seemingly huge body of water, of which I assumed at first, was the ocean. Though in fact, given the area that it has been narrowed down to, it most likely is one of the great lakes (probably the coast of Lake Michigan given the hotspots of the other maps).




We don't have to stop there! Due to the use of mining and the city environment, it most likely would take place in a city where mining or mineral processing is taking place. In the game, there is a part after you escape the first siren, you come onto the shore that leads to an old mining area. This step should give us a pretty much exact location based on where mineral proccessing plants are located.





The images above are cropped from the Metals--Ore Processing Plants and Smelters or Refineries PDF on the USGS Minerals Mapdate[minerals.usgs.gov] site. It shows a hotspot in Tin and Chromium processing plants in an area at the bottom of Lake Michigan, which is also pretty close to Maize fields and pig farms in the other maps. This would put the story smack dab in the middle of a flooded Chicago. The boy ventures from the rural farms outside of the city into the flooded city itself, and then end up on the shore of Lake Michigan. This isn’t the Chicago we know of course, it’s a flooded, run down, parasite ridden version of the city with zombies, plebs, and sirens that takes place far in the future.



NOW REMEMBER : This conclusion is based on a lot of pretty heavy inferences. Take this location with a grain of salt as more ideas will come out in the future that are better than this one.

Brainwashing Chambers

As I was piecing the puzzle together, I had two questions that just wouldn't click, why are some people zombies and not others, and what are all of these weird chambers everywhere? These chambers are found throughout the game from beginning to end, in the forests, in factories, they’re everywhere!

But then I had an epiphany, and how glorious a feeling they are! I realized that the chambers are found throughout the game because they’re whats used to brainwash normal people into zombies. And wherever you find zombies, it seems that you also find these chambers.





Even in the beginning, a huge shipment of what appears to be zombies are loaded up into a truck and shipped off. Right next to the truck is a fairly large amount of chambers. The people that are seemingly running the operation kill anyone who witnesses these things, even kids. You’d have to be doing something pretty sketchy if you’re willing to kill a kid to keep it secret, like, I don’t know, kidnapping and brainwashing!

What Are the Plebs?

These creatures shown above are very strange indeed, they resemble half-baked humans, and that’s exactly what they are. They are grown upside down in suspended waters and held in place by large weights. They are similar to zombies in functionality, which are a needed source in this city. Many things need to be taken care of that endanger people of becoming infected, so the people on the outskirts kidnap people outside of the city, brainwash them, and have them work in jobs like farming and mining so that needed civilians aren’t infected. This allows for the people in the center to focus on creating a cure for the parasite that is infesting the world’s population. Plebs are made for many purposes, things like testing cures on human cells, replacing zombies on the outskirts, and can also be used to take over jobs in the city without risking infection of the inner city since they have been grown in labs and never been exposed by the parasites.



There are two things that these plebs pictured above could be accomplishing :

1. They could be used to find a way to cure the parasites from human like organs, and even though plebs don't have human like outer appearences, their organ systems might be spot on. They've been intentionally infected to test cures on, and it seems that some cures are working, and others are not.
   
2. Their infection could also be unintentional, destroying what appears to be a pretty extensive growing chamber. This might also explain the less advanced growing chamber later on in the game that is much closer to the inner city, they had to create a rather makeshift growing chamber since the main one had to be quarantined.

These plebs might also be doing one of two things :

1. The plebs above might be used to test new methods of removing the parasites without killing the host. They have bandages around various areas of the body, and if this is true, it points out that the worms don't just inhabit the intestines, but spread throughout the body. This might be why they are so deadly and hard to remove.
   
2. The plebs might also be monitored to see if they are fit for more complex jobs like surgery. Though this might be the case, this one is obviously not ready as what appears to be blood is covering the floor, and you probably want to keep that in the patient when performing surgery.

Plebs with higher order brain function might be added to the Pleb boss to increase its overall intelligence. Adding brains to the creature does seemingly increase its intelligence as when the boy is absorbed, the creature does exhibit a visible change in its behavior, but whether or not the creature was able to escape on its own without the boy if it were not held in place is unknown.

What Is the Pleb Boss?

The Pleb Boss is a writhing mass of Pleb flesh. Arms and legs stick out randomly from all over its body but it had a seemingly important role in the cities existence. When in the huge vat of water, the Pleb Boss was restrained and had four mind control units impaled into its flesh, giving us the assumption that it was controlling something. What the Pleb Boss was controlling was probably the immense amount of zombies coming into the city. At first I didn’t think this, until I played through the part where you blend into the line of zombies.



In the line, there were 3 distinct actions taking place, walking, jumping, and turning. If you’ve played the game, you know a person with a mind control helmet on can’t perform such a complex multitude of actions. If people were controlling them, then you would have to have 3 different people, each one performing their own action, and then switching control of zombies to and from control to one another. Sure this doesn’t seem impossible, until you imagine that this is only one checkpoint for only one line, and there were probably hundreds of lines elsewhere that aren’t directly visible. This job would require a lot of people overall, people that are not seen and probably do not exist since the streets of this city are extremely empty. This is why the Pleb Boss most likely controls them and directs them all at once, a huge hive mind controlling the migration of the vast numbers of zombies throughout the outskirts of the city. Once the Pleb Boss is released by the boy, the migrations of these zombies probably stopped entirely, hundreds collapse in the streets of the abandoned outskirts. After this, the outskirts people would try to keep collecting people and brainwashing, but they would not reanimate and go to their assigned jobs, this would mean the end to the kidnapping of people outside the city. Soon, inner city people would have to acquire jobs that put them at risk of infection, and some will get infected, causing the population of the inner city to go downhill really quick. Anyone left will be frightened of infection and will leave the city through the edge facing Lake Michigan where the Pleb Boss escaped to and away from people to decrease the chance of infection. The only way to prevent this is to create another Pleb Boss, but if the creature was a random mutation that they don’t know how to replicate, there is no recovery unless they recapture the original Pleb Boss. Even though the Pleb Boss escaped its enclosure, it might not live that long in the real world. In order to merge bodies like it does, it needs to destroy the immune system of the creature it absorbs, if not, the contradicting immune systems will clash and the body will be rejected and probably kill the Pleb Boss. Most likely the Pleb Boss has an internal mechanism for destroying any type of immune system, allowing it to merge with anybody at any time. If this were the case, the tank it lived in was probably a clean room with a large filter that kept out any bacteria, viruses, and other life forms with things like radiation cleansing. Once the Pleb Boss escapes the tank, its lack of an immune system means that bacteria and viruses are free to ravage its body with nothing to fight it off. If this is true, the Pleb Boss will most likely get sick and start to rot while it’s still alive.

What Are the Sirens?

Sirens are creatures that exist within the flooded areas of the city and attempt to drown the boy if they catch him. The idea of how they’re created is only briefly touched upon in the game. Most likely Sirens started out as people and were exposed to the same device, or whatever was inside the device, that gave the boy the ability to breathe underwater, though this can’t just be the case as Sirens have a pretty large difference when it comes to behavior compared to normal people. There is something difference about the Siren’s abilities as it seems that they no longer can venture onto land, all sirens stop at the surface and won’t go past it. Sirens might have had a mutation which caused them to acquire this ability and the device might have been derived from studying their mutation. If it is caused by a mutation, it is most likely a recessive gene found on the X chromosome given that there are no male sirens seen throughout the game. There are only 2 sirens or 3 sirens in the game, one in the beginning, one in the middle, and the one at the end might be the same one from the beginning.

Sirens do not like company, as you can tell after meeting your first while inside a submarine. If you allow her to swim up without the light shining onto her, she breaks through the glass and kills you. Though Sirens are violent by nature, I think the first one attacked you mainly because you were in a submarine. She most likely assumed that you were part of the outskirts people since you were inside the diving vessel. The outskirts people dive down into the sunken city to retrieve items lost to the flood, and most likely try to capture her in the process for study. The device that grants the boy the ability to breathe underwater might be the reason for the outskirts people to be searching the flooded city. The machine might have been developed from dissection and study of the Sirens before the world went to hell, if this is the case, it would explain the Siren’s hatred of surface people. Before the world plunged into the apocalypse, there were obvious advanced in science. Machines like brainwashers and mind control were created, but both of these devices would have needed some pretty unethical practices to accomplish them, so it wouldn’t be too farfetched that the underwater breathing machine was derived from dissection of humans with a mutation if unethical practices were a commonplace.



The second siren you meet is a different one, and you can tell by the IV lines attached to her body. One of the lines is empty and one is full of blood and seems to be connected to a machine in the back. It slightly resembles a device that would circulate blood and or extract it. If this Siren hasn’t moved from its location since the flood, it might have been under study judging by the window and devices around it. This Siren attacks you because she doesn’t know the end game like the first Siren does, and only attacks you because you are an intruder.

Though after you pass this Siren, you quickly meet another which I assumed at first was the same one pictured above, but after closer examination, this one doesn’t have the IVs attached. This Siren might be the one from the beginning.




It seems that she tries to drown you at first, but then once the boy is unconscious, she attaches some device that gives him the ability to breathe underwater, which is a very useful ability throughout the rest of the game. She has an apparent change of heart from attempting to kill you to helping you out. This is probably because she realized that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Sirens are very reclusive creatures and do not want to be disturbed, and her end game is to get everyone on the surface to leave the city, which finally leaves her in peace. At first she thinks that you are one of the outskirts people, but after you try to avoid her instead of capturing her, and escape through areas the others didn’t go, she probably realized that you were not a threat. It would have been safe for her to assume that you are infected, and once you enter the city, you’d infect others, which would cause the rest of the city to scatter. This is why she attaches the device to the boy in order to help him reach her end goal. Once the city’s population is gone, she would be at peace. If she assumes that you are after the Pleb Boss, then this would be even more in her favor. Once the Pleb Boss is gone, there is nothing left the control the zombies, no zombies, no outskirts, no outskirts, no more patrols, and the city slowly dies as people need to take up jobs that put them at risk of infection. With no more people in the city, nobody is diving down in submarines and disturbing her.

What Are the Achievement Spheres?

These spheres found throughout the game are very strange indeed. They give off light from various points around the shell and give off a pop with a shower of sparks if the core is removed. These are most likely power supplies to various instruments used throughout the world. They aren’t just any power supply though; they are most likely powered by nuclear decay, basically making them mini nuclear reactors.




The circled area of the Curiosity rover is a radioisotope thermoelectric generator and keeps the rover running. The core of the Achievement Spheres that you pull out resembles the cylindrical core of the GPHS-RTG. The core would work as a containment unit while the sphere itself would work as the outer casing of the GPHS and would gather the radiation from the core to supply power to whatever device you need.


So when the boy pulls out the core, he exposes the surrounding area in radiation, including himself. The achievement sphere from the Achievement, “The Last One”, most likely generates power for the whole city and probably gave the boy a nice bath of ionizing radiation when confronting it.

What Is the Meaning of the Secret Ending?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, there are loads of tutorials already telling you how to do this. But for those who already know what I’m talking about, I will take you through what I think it is. If you have gotten the secret ending, it can be a little puzzling, where the boy pulls the plug and becomes a zombie. It’s a little weird to process, and when I experienced it at first, I had no idea what to think.




I think that there are two ways of taking this, and since each theory is just as plausible as the other one, you can pick which ones helps you sleep better at night.

1. The first theory is that this doesn’t have anything to do with the game at all, the computers plugged into the mind control device represents the player controlling the boy, and when it is disconnected, the connection the player has to the boy also fades. Personally I think this one settles with me better as I didn’t have to come up with a conspiracy and everything about it, it’s simple and nice.
   
2. The second theory is that the boy is actually a zombie and is controlled by someone else entirely. The scientists inside the city might be the ones controlling him as a means to set the Pleb Boss free. This is possible as the scientists gather around the tank like they expected something to happen, and there is no indicator that today was unlike any other day. They seem a little bit surprised that the person breaking him out is a boy though, but they help the Pleb Boss escape somewhat afterwards. You can interpret it as them trying to trap him the whole time, or that they get him to a tank in which he can escape.

[SLeePinDarK]

Some guys found +1 ARG mystery, but it only part of it
Also data miners speak about some kind of hidden elevator under the corn field

[alpal]

i think at first the boy was alive (though im not sure why he was exploring the labs), but then when the siren pulls him underwater he dies, and it plugged into the hivemind with the yellow box. from then on the hivemind is controlling him and leading him to it to save it.

[Vin Von Voom]

@FatJesus Your theory is very interesting but I think there's a major issue with it. If the boy was in fact a zombie, how come he had to actively blend in with the other zombies in the line sequence, and why is he so bad at it? Even if we're ignoring the gameplay of having to do it manually his animations just don't match the other guys and imply he's doing an act, checking around and breaking character constantly. He's clearly of higher cognition than the other Zombies and if he truly is one that would also make him the only child zombie in the whole game.

[Dallas Zedland]

If the Pleb King was controlling the boy then why did the boy try to get away from the limbs every time they grabbed for him? If indeed they did control the boy would they not have tried to quickly maneuver him to the next plug helmet? Further more the death of the pleb king isnt the end because your able to load another boy up till you continue and finish the game with the secret ending. I think you are what is unplugged in the secret ending. I think your trying to find some respite by killing yourself and destroying the power supply to your control node. Not only that but you also destroyed what ever satanic crap all the scientist were up to. One odd thought I had was how violent they can be with a small child. Yet when your swimming or when they shoot at you they aren't shooting you with bullets but with tranquilizer darts. Why the dissimilarity in aggression. One dude slams your throat into a hand railing when dealing with you up close but far away and they put you to sleep.

[FatJesus]

Part 4
11) The water everywhere is not all from flooding. They may have needed to build mining facilities in water-based sections of the planet to get the minerals they were looking for. That's why they had water pumps built that could be used with the push of a button.
12) Being on another planet in itself doesn't explain why gravity works differently for water in some areas. Could be gravity-controlling technology that gets thrown into various sci-fi plots.
13) I don't think the chambers everywhere are brainwashing chambers. To brainwash you'd just bring people to a single location. I think they're located in so many places as somewhere to hide for protection. Could be to hide from zombies or something else.

Fun game to think about.

[FatJesus]

Part 3
8) People inside the facility at the end were helping/not helping based on their roles. The government/Illuminati built everything and had scientists and others to help grow and harvest plebs and keep pleb king in captivity. Some workers had moral objections to what was occurring so cheered and helped with the escape.
9) I think trying to figure out the location on earth is futile. I think it's more likely this is another planet/moon colonized by humans that was being mined and terraformed. The virus/spores/infection could have been native to that planet. This is why there was mining, military, scientists but no 'average' jobs around.
10) Sirens could have been native to the planet which is why they're hostile to outsiders who came to take the planet's resources, pollute the water, etc. The IV lines attached to the second siren could be a sign of escaping after being experimented on.

[FatJesus]

Part 2
5) There was one area where the boy controls a zombie who then gets in a controller to control another zombie. Not too far of a stretch to add one more level back to pleb king. Boy was a zombie which is why the boy could blend in with the other zombies for the Thriller section.
6) The plebs were being grown for food. They were being grown in a farming style setup. Other livestock was shown dead and not eaten. Likely died from a parasite or disease as you mentioned and cloned, mindless humans became the main source of protein.
7) Playing now post-pandemic it's clear the masks were to prevent some kind of infection, spores, zombie farts. Think mask usage is based on being inside/outside of quarantine rather than class structure.

[FatJesus]

Part 1
Enjoyed reading your theories on the story. I've only played through once and have some first impressions. Apologies for everything jumping around as I think through everything while writing this up.
1) Main character was never trying to escape. The whole game is leading the player to the pleb king. Going deeper into the facility is the opposite of escaping. The goal was always to free the pleb king but that was unknown until the end.
2) The boy had freeing pleb king as a goal because the boy was being controlled by the pleb king and players were unknowingly playing the pleb king from the beginning.
3) Pleb king had 4 wires connected. The area where boy had to blend with zombies had 3 sections. Each section went to a line plugged into the pleb king. Fourth line was controlling the boy.
4) When freeing the pleb king the boy disconnects 3 wires and then is absorbed and 4th wire breaks. The 4th wire was the boy's wire.

[Yuri]

Ahh, one more thing came to my mind - I don't really think this takes place in the future, somehow everything has an 80s vibe to it and the computers we see at the end look like huge monochrome amber CRT mainframe consoles. Sure, there's mind control and some out-of-place mysterious technologies, but it feels more like an alternate past.

[Yuri]

There's no real indication that this is any kind of post-apocalypse, as we only really see a tiny sliver of the world, but it does FEEL like it... We also only ever see a single worm sticking out of a pig's butt, so I would lean into it too much.

The blasts are 100% not caused by explosives, that would be just stupid.

Personally I think that the underwater being is a single entity, not a group. And it's a tough one because it doesn't fit into most theories or ideas I'm seeing.

Anyway, a fun read, thanks!