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Inner Life is a puzzle-adventure game with a unique dystopian setting. The world has become an icy wasteland, and humans must live inside giant humanoid creatures called titans in order to survive. These titans are mechanical, so the humans that reside within them must take care of all of their parts and mechanisms in order for them to live. You play as the Healer, a mysterious individual who resembles a plague doctor. His job is to help titans who are not being taken care of properly. After failing to save the life of an unnamed titan, the Healer finds another titan named Toni, who is in bad shape.
The game mostly takes place inside Toni’s body, where you will explore four different areas: the brain, the heart, the knee, and the lung. Each of these areas have their own characters, items, and puzzles. Your goal in each area is to fix the broken or malfunctioning parts of Toni’s body and help the people inside of them so that they can maintain them on their own.
Inner Life consists of exploring, talking to NPCs, solving environmental puzzles, and picking up and using items. You do this until the Healer declares that his work in this area is now done, and then you move on to the next location after talking to Toni. Most of the game’s puzzles are very simplistic and not hard to figure out, but they are enjoyable enough. The hardest and most complex puzzle in the game by far was the final one. Each area also has a section that contains obstacles that you must maneuver through to get to the next room. If you get caught by one of the obstacles, you have to retry the section until you succeed. This was definitely my least favorite part of the game, since these sections are more annoying than they are fun or challenging and you have to pass through each one multiple times. I think that the game would just be better off without them.
The other most frequent form of gameplay is finding and using items. You will often need to find items in the environment and either give them to certain characters or use them on certain objects in order to progress. Most of the puzzles in the game require the use of items to some extent. These items are not usually hard to find, since most of them (especially early in the game) can be found just lying on the floor somewhere in the room you are currently in. It is also usually pretty obvious which items are needed in which situations. There are also some items that are not needed to progress, but they will elicit different dialogue from certain NPCs and are probably just there for variety.
While I did enjoy the way in which items were used in Inner Life, it was also the source of some of the game’s issues. You can only hold one item with you at a time, which was not a major problem but still somewhat annoying. If you are holding an item and want to pick up something else, you first have to drop the item you are holding with the Q key. Multiple people on Inner Life’s itch.io page (of which there is a link to at the top of this page) reported a bug in which an item would disappear after being dropped, leaving them with no choice but to restart the game. I was worried that this would happen while I was playing, but it never did, so perhaps the glitch has been fixed by now. I thought that this was worth mentioning, even if it never happened to me.
However, I did run into a situation in which the game was not clear about what item I needed to progress. At one point in the game during my second playthrough, I had to find a set of three items throughout the lung area and return them to a certain character. I found and returned the first two without any issues, but when I tried to return the third one, the character acted as if I did not have it with me. I thought that I had soft locked myself and would have to restart, until I realized that there was another unrelated item that I had to find and give to the character first. The game did not give me any hint or indication that I was giving the items in the wrong order, and I only realized what I was actually supposed to do because I did it correctly on my first playthrough.
Compared to other games of its kind, Inner Life has a lot of text and character dialogue. You are frequently given multiple dialogue options when interacting with characters and objects. These can be nice, mean (a lot of them contain the f word), funny, or sarcastic. As far as I could tell, none of these decisions had any influence on the game’s story or progression in any meaningful way, they were just there for fun. The Healer will also just talk to himself sometimes, often to either give hints to the player on what to do or comment on a certain object or event. I thought that the dialogue was decently written, but most of the characters had fairly generic personalities. The most likable and well written one is definitely Toni, which makes sense since he is the most important character in the game. It was satisfying to see his relationship with the Healer develop over the course of the story.
Overall, Inner Life is a well made game and a worthwhile experience to play. The game’s world is well realized and contains just enough interesting details to leave you intrigued by it after you finish playing, despite the fact that its backstory is never fully explained. The game’s sound effects are fairly limited (though I would expect that for a free indie game) and there are only one or two music tracks that play during cutscenes. Most of what you will hear throughout the game are ambient noises. It would have been cool if each of the four areas had their own music theme, and it would also have helped each of them to stand out from one another. One of my favorite aspects of the game is its pixel art style. The environments and set pieces looked really nice and the character sprites are well animated.
I would recommend Inner Life to anyone who enjoys top-down adventure games or games with pixel art. I finished the game in roughly an hour on my first playthrough, so it is not a huge time investment. I chose this game for my analysis because I thought that it looked intriguing and might have an interesting story to tell. I did find the story and the game as a whole interesting overall, but I was a bit disappointed with the game’s ending. It decides to end on a heavy emotional moment instead of a major revelation about the game’s story or world, which is what I would rather have seen. That’s just a personal preference, though.
