INMOST

Most indie horror games announce themselves with a jump scare in the first ninety seconds. INMOST opens with a knight, a scythe, and a castle that sounds like it’s exhaling. That restraint tells you what kind of production this is.

Built by Hidden Layer Games, a small Lithuanian studio, and published by Chucklefish — the outfit behind Stardew Valley‘s original release and Wargroove — INMOST arrived as one of those projects that spent years longer in development than its length would suggest. It shows. EDGE called it “an intimidatingly polished horror platformer,” and that adverb is doing precise work. This is not a game that impresses because a tiny team made it. It’s a game that impresses, full stop.

The structure is the pitch: three playable characters, three distinct control schemes, one story that only makes sense once all three have been seen through. A scythe-wielding knight fighting through a decaying otherworldly castle. A young girl exploring a quiet house, poking at things she probably shouldn’t. A weathered wanderer with a pickaxe and a hookshot, prying his way through ruins. The game cuts between them the way a film cuts between timelines, and the connective tissue is memory — fragments that arrive on their own schedule and land harder because the game refuses to explain them early.

Commercially, it sits in an interesting spot. The App Store holds it at 4.8 out of 5 from 736 ratings, and reception across the other storefronts has been strongly positive — near-unanimous approval across audiences that rarely agree. The friction point isn’t quality. It’s the $14.99 desktop and Switch price against a runtime shorter than a long film — and a mobile version that quietly softens the problem with a lower price and a free opening chapter.

• Three-perspective narrative design: Each protagonist has a different verb set — combat, observation, traversal — so the game changes its grammar every twenty minutes instead of stretching one mechanic across five hours.
• Hand-crafted pixel art with dynamic lighting: Real-time light, shadow and particle work layered over sprite art. The lighting isn’t decoration; it’s the horror system.
• Full voice acting: Cassandra Lee Morris and Andrew Dennis lead a cast that treats the material as drama rather than genre exercise.
• Original score: A mournful, restrained soundtrack that knows when to stop playing entirely.
• Designed for one sitting: A deliberate 3–5 hour arc with no padding, no collectathon, no filler.
• Multiple language localizations and a free opening chapter on mobile — a generous way to sample before paying.

The Gameplay Loop

INMOST rotates rather than escalates. That’s the central design decision, and it’s the one worth arguing about.

The knight is the action chapter: a scythe, a dash, enemies that telegraph, traps that don’t. His sections are the closest the game comes to conventional challenge, and they’re also the weakest link. The combat is stiff — not broken, not unresponsive, but deliberate in a way that reads as heavy rather than weighty. There’s a difference. A heavy attack in Hollow Knight feels like commitment. The knight’s attacks feel like the animation is ahead of the player’s intent. In the chase and stealth sequences where monsters hunt you through corridors, that half-beat of lag turns tension into trial-and-error. Paired with checkpoint placement that can force a re-watch of a beat already nailed, it’s the design’s most visible weakness.

The girl’s chapters are the opposite and, frankly, the strongest material here. You walk. You look at things. You climb onto a chair to reach a cabinet. There is no fail state worth speaking of, and the game uses that safety to do something genuinely unsettling — it makes an ordinary house feel like a place where something is about to be understood. The interaction design is spare: a prompt, a line of narration, a small animation. It works because Hidden Layer resisted the urge to gamify it. No collectibles. No checklist. Just a child in rooms she’s been told not to enter.

The wanderer carries the traversal load. Pickaxe to pry open passages, hookshot to swing gaps. His sections are the most mechanically satisfying moment-to-moment — the hookshot has a clean arc and a forgiving window, and the level geometry is built to reward momentum. This is where the platforming actually platforms.

The Puzzle Problem

Let’s be direct: the puzzles are not hard. Anyone coming for Limbo‘s physics riddles or The Swapper‘s escalating logic will clear most of INMOST’s obstacles on first sight. Pull the lever. Lure the thing into the trap. Move the box. The environmental puzzles function as pacing devices — they slow you down enough to notice the room — not as tests.

That’s less a flaw than a mismatch between the game and its own genre label. INMOST is marketed as a puzzle platformer. It is really a narrative game with platforming and puzzle interludes, closer to What Remains of Edith Finch in intent than to Inside in structure, despite borrowing Inside‘s visual vocabulary wholesale. Players who understand that going in should love it. Players expecting mechanical depth will get a good three hours and a shrug.

Onboarding and Flow

There’s almost no tutorial friction. Each character introduces their verb through level design rather than a text box, and because the perspectives rotate, the game never has time to get comfortable. The pacing is its sharpest tool — just as the knight’s combat starts to wear thin, you’re a girl in a hallway again.

The story itself — spoilers withheld — is about grief, illness and loss, and it commits to that. The reveal isn’t a twist so much as a slow focusing of a lens you didn’t know was blurred. Where a lesser game would go nihilistic, INMOST goes sad. Specifically sad, in a way that suggests someone on the team was writing from experience. That it lands in under five hours is the achievement. Most games take thirty and don’t get there.

The pixel art is the marquee, but the lighting is the craft. Sprites are lit dynamically — torch flicker crawling across a wall, a lantern carving a cone out of total black, particles drifting through a shaft of light like dust in an attic. It’s the same trick that made Blasphemous and Children of Morta look more expensive than they were, executed with more discipline than either. Darkness here isn’t an absence of art assets. It’s a designed volume.

Sound design deserves equal billing. The score stays out of the way for long stretches, and the silence it leaves is where the dread lives. The voice performances are recorded and mixed to a standard you’d expect from a studio ten times this size.

As a design matter, the technical demands are modest: this is a 2D game of small scope, light on hardware, and the minimal UI — near-invisible, which is correct for the material — keeps nothing between the player and the frame.

Steam / PC is the reference version. Gamepad is the right input — the wanderer’s hookshot and the knight’s dash both want analog precision, and keyboard-and-mouse is supported but never feels native. At $14.99 it’s also the version that draws the price complaints, and the objection is understandable even where the verdict differs.

Nintendo Switch is arguably the ideal home. The 3–5 hour arc is exactly one long evening on the couch or two commutes, handheld mode flatters the pixel art’s density, and the darkness reads cleanly on an OLED panel. Same $14.99 ask.

iOS and Android are where the value equation flips. The first chapter is free and the full unlock costs well below the desktop price — a fraction of it. The touch controls are the honest compromise: virtual stick and buttons, workable for the girl’s exploration and the wanderer’s traversal, but fiddlier in principle during the knight’s combat and the chase sequences where a missed dash costs a checkpoint. The strong mobile ratings reflect an audience that got a carefully made game for pocket change and had little reason to quibble about a virtual d-pad.

For anyone with a Switch or a decent PC who cares about input fidelity, buy it there. To find out whether the story lands, the free mobile chapter is an unhurried sample, not a teaser.

• Puzzle purists hunting for mechanical challenge.
• Players who measure value in hours-per-dollar.
• Anyone who wants combat to be the point.

INMOST knows precisely what it is and refuses to be anything else. Hidden Layer Games could have padded this to twelve hours with backtracking and collectibles, and the Steam price complaints would have evaporated. It would also have ruined the game. The reason the ending hits is that nothing in the preceding hours was wasting your time.

The criticisms are real. The combat needed another pass. The puzzles are scenery. Five hours at fifteen dollars is a defensible objection — though two hours in a cinema seat costs the same and gets argued about far less.

What INMOST offers instead is craft: lighting that does emotional work, performances that earn the script, and a structural conceit that pays off. It’s a good game with clear limits, not a great one — buy it on Switch for the couch, on Steam for the gamepad, or on a phone for the cheap version of the same story. Just don’t buy it expecting to be puzzled. Buy it expecting to be wrecked.