There’s something glowing brightly at the center of Inmost’s rendition of a narrative platformer. A spark of the personal or somber reckoning with grief and tragedy that is considerably more ambitious than a few screenshots of the game may portray. The experience is unusually rigid, despite its diversity of gameplay styles, but it’s also taxing and sometimes outright crude. “Frequently tedious” really shouldn’t be a tag affixed to a three-hour game, but Inmost earns it in its least interesting moments, even if the finished product will win over a portion of its players.

A park bench under a streetlight offers two paths. Behind and to the left lies a derelict home, while ahead and to the right is a kind of unfurling overgrown castle, constantly reaching upwards to the night sky. A small male avatar can mosey around, jump over pits, and scramble up ladders, but soon encounters deadly shadowy figures with no means to defend himself. A few other characters soon emerge, all of whom speak in riddles or obscure phrases, and eventually other controllable characters as well, including a young girl trapped in a house and a knight wielding a powerful sword with a hookshot.

Inmost’s trinity of heroes are built of just a few pixels and colors, but their animated mannerisms and the gorgeous backgrounds flowing behind them add an incredible sense of place. The unnamed macabre environment always feels ominously meaningful, and certain symbols and events echo throughout the fractured narrative. A flower, a stuffed rabbit toy, a knife, a few crude drawings, a housefire - for a portion of the game, these little sprinkles of story adeptly prod the mystery, and new scenes add context to previous ones.


Unfortunately, that narrative begins to falter, eventually unraveling into a bizarrely lengthy coda. On first blush, there arrives the notion that something about Inmost’s development was rushed and left to rest entirely on the finale’s shoulders, and the short length of the game makes this apparent compromise felt more deeply. It doesn’t help that the story progression and even the characters’ movement itself is usually glacial, especially the sections from the POV of the little girl. Here, players inch through rooms, shoving chairs and boxes, solving uninteresting “puzzles” of sorts, and occasionally activating plot developments.

Although Inmost looks like a platformer, it’s probably most similar to a point-and-click adventure. There are death states, though checkpointing is usually negligibly close - in some cases, whether or not this is a bug, players temporally respawn after they’ve died, which can be unexpectedly convenient - and the only meaningful challenge ever presented is figuring out where to travel to push things along and activate the next scene. This means that there’s never a sense of agency, which might be intentional, considering the subject matter.


In avoidance of spoilers, that context is fairly grim. Pain and grief, psychosis and trauma, childhood tragedy, and especially how these elements fracture families are all willfully explored and presented, but there’s also a conspicuous lack of sophistication in the narrative. Whether or not these aspects are in any way framed by a real-life invested catharsis is unclear, but the quality of the story itself often wavers into amateurish cringe. One character frequently gathers collectible “shards of pain,” which can be delivered to an NPC for enigmatic story fragments, all written with a goofy hissing “s.” Some sections of the game feature voiceover, delivered by actors clearly instructed to perform these lines as if they were the most sacred and profound conclusions ever summoned, which makes a sentence like “It simply is what it is” unintentionally hilarious.

It’s unfortunate that the narrative misfires this tone, but that doesn’t mean that Inmost lacks for great moments. There’s a fantastic chase encounter with a masked shadow through a crypt, some alarming moments with the little girl that render a fierce emotional response, and an incredibly effective soundtrack. There are so many pixel-based games kicking around these days, but Inmost’s visual presentation singles it out from the pack, using parallax-styled backgrounds, rustling vegetation, and superb lighting to add impressive atmosphere to every scene. On the visual and audio fronts, this game is an absolute winner.


That sense of place makes Inmost a guarded recommendation, even if portions of it can feel slow and the story is less profound than it wishes it was. Scrambling around the castle in the platformer sections always leads to a curious mechanism, encounter, or vista, and the puzzles are simple enough to rarely prompt any outside assistance. It’s a unique, short, and probably over-priced game for what it offers, but Inmost's terrific presentation still makes it worth a look.

Inmost is out now on PC and Nintendo Switch with a retail price of $14.99, and also included in Apple Arcade.