On July 1, 2016, I sent an email to info@playdead.com with the subject line "My Heroes." I'd just finished INSIDE, and I was tearing up while writing it. I apologized for my bad English at the bottom and wasn't even sure I had the right address.

I still think about this email, because I've never sent another one like that one.

In this two-part piece I want to, first explore what made me do it, and then look into why Playdead chose silence as a brand voice for this game.

I didn't even know INSIDE was a Playdead game when I picked it up. I'd played Limbo years before and thought it was wonderful, but I never went deep into who made it. I just came home from a long day at work, saw it on my Xbox One home screen, and started playing.

I didn't realize at the time, but that was the best way to play it. Completely blind.

INSIDE is a 2016 puzzle-platformer by Playdead, the Danish studio behind Limbo. Much like Limbo, there is no dialogue, tutorial or HUD. The controls are about as simple as it gets: move, jump, interact; the same inputs we all learned as kids. But the world they built around those controls is layered, unsettling, though-provoking. This game is an art form, and art is not there to please you.

No matter if you're inside a facility or an underwater corridor, the feeling of not having a choice about where to go is constant. We go right because that's the only option and the game never lets you forget it.

Trapped in the Machine

I like to think that the game is about control, about who has it, and about the costs of freedom. We see people are herded through the world like cattle. We spend three hours watching this happen and participating in it because we're doing the exact same thing to the boy. We press right and he runs, we press jump and he jumps. He has no say. But we're doing it for the right reasons… right?

The Feeling of Tragic Happiness

When the boy (whatever is left of him) finally reaches sunlight and just lies in the grass, it broke something open in me. Sunshine! That's the most radical thing the game could do.

He made it out, but he wasn't himself anymore, and the sunshine and the birds, none of it could reach him anymore. So thoroughly controlled that by the time he broke free he was unrecognizable. The boy who wanted out didn't make it. Something else did.

Erich Fromm wrote in 1941 that freedom, when it finally comes after a life of being controlled, doesn't feel like relief. It feels like having nothing left to push against.

I think that is the tragic happiness of it. He wanted out, he fought for it and he got out, just couldn't take himself with him.

Why This Game? Why That Night?

Almost ten years later I still don't have an answer for what happened that night. I don't remember any internal crisis or personal issues at time of my life, but somehow I ended up writing a fan email to a random studio in Copenhagen.

That's why I believe INSIDE didn't find a crack and slip through. It just walked in on a normal evening without asking and beat the shit out of me. That's the most impressive thing about it.

What I know is that I carried the boy there, and the weight of what he became was partly mine too. INSIDE made me complicit, made me believe I was the hero and then they show me the receipt.

Oh, and Kalle from Playdead wrote back four hours later. He'd give the team a hug from me.

Part two is about Playdead's silence as a brand choice, and what most studios get wrong when they try to copy it.