InnerSpace (Xbox One)

InnerSpace, having no ties to the similarly named 80s film, is a game that claims to be an exploration flying game, but I’m not quite sure the developers quite understood the appeal of exploration in a video game. From their own website they encourage you to take your time and you’ll find your way through the game gradually, and while a game where you did fly around an open world discovering things as you went could be interesting, that is not what InnerSpace is.

 

InnerSpace asks you to explore a place called the Inverse, which is a planet that ran on an energy source called Wind that ended up sowing the seeds of its inhabitants’ undoing through its overuse. Now, an archaeologist has decided to discover as much as they can about it in the world’s final days, employing the use of an AI-controlled plane known as the Cartographer that the player is in command of. The Inverse isn’t a bad looking place, it has many bright, striking colors in its areas, and on first glance, the artistic design is actually quite interesting and inviting. Unfortunately, the Inverse does not really do much with its location design. There are a few landmarks here or there, but most areas in the game are wide open and mostly empty air spaces, most of the world design wasted on generic things like mountains or barren undersea locations.  If the areas of InnerSpace were connected fluidly, the rather shallow visual design of the areas could be made up for as they’d be part of a more expansive whole, but getting between the areas of the game require taking teleporters, and these teleporters are a problem in themselves.

You see, despite being supposedly focused on exploration, InnerSpace will lock you in one area and give you progression focused tasks to try and find the way to the next area, although the game won’t really indicate much on how to get to the next area. The Archaeologist offers vague tips, but mostly you are left to your own devices, the game hoping you’ll stumble across the unknown goal and complete it for the sake of it. Here, the issue is that these wide open but secluded areas are not really designed either for exploration or for finding the way onward very well. The separate areas all have their own color palette that does make them feel distinct, but it also means that you can expect very little visual variation in one realm. Your plane can fly upside down and turn all around with ease, even having the option to plunge underwater, but outside its value as a colorful landscape and the few interesting landmarks, you won’t find much to either look at or engage with for a relaxing flight. If you’re trying to find the way to continue the game’s plot instead, you’ll find it often tied to very small parts of the environment. While flying around, you may find ropes to cut with your wings, small gates to fly through to activate, and that’s pretty much it when it comes to interacting with the environment. Not all of these have an important role though, and many of them require spotting small tunnel systems to fly through or barely noticeable elements of the environment to engage with, ones that can be easily glossed over since a lot of the world looks incredibly similar. If you leave an area and return it resets some of the work you’ve done in that regard as well, only complicating matters if you don’t do a full world exploration in one sitting.

 

Even in that regard, the progression gating is boring when you find out where you need to do something, making a poor pairing with the fact that you’re usually locked into wide spherical environments with vistas that lose their flair once you’ve seen all they can offer in the first few minutes of being there. To at least make the place feel a bit less empty there are Wind orbs floating around and optional hidden Relics to find that can either upgrade your plane or offer a very shallow look at life before The Ancients sowed their own undoing with their wastefulness. Outside of the basic explanations of the place’s history not much is learned about the world that fleshes it out beyond basic details, and besides The Archaeologist and The Cartographer, you’re mostly alone during the journey, meaning that not only do the places feel barren and still, but there’s very little threatening you as you explore. The game will only really destroy your plane to save you from being stuck or if you have a deliberately weak frame equipped for kicks, so it does at least understand that punishing exploration isn’t conducive to the process, but at the same time it leaves out much for you to interact with or look at. The late game levels do gradually get a bit more linear, pushing you away from finding the proverbial needle in a haystack that can be progression in the wide open worlds, but these have their own faults. More linearity comes with areas designed with much more practical functions that the player doesn’t so much as solve as they are doing the few actions available to them and making progress by way of having no other options. Some of these late areas certainly think they’re doing something interesting or meaningful in how they lay out the interactive environment elements, but it’s more pretty visuals than puzzle-solving, although these at least look better than the bland early areas that are mostly pastel spherical landscapes.

While most of the core concepts and environmental design of InnerSpace don’t feed well into the exploration/narrative mix it is attempting, there are two ways the game gets something right. The flying, although not having much use for interacting with the world, has a pretty solid control system, only really having trouble with the tightest of areas as you are given the means to shift its orientation pretty easily. The plane doesn’t immediately jerk to how you want to position it either, the player gradually gaining control and understanding of it, it controlling like a real vehicle that just so happens to be able to fly upside down and underwater with ease. However, there’s also a stalling maneuver where you can arrest most of your momentum quickly to aim yourself and burst in that direction, this patching over the moments where precise control is required so that you have the feeling of controlling a flying device but the convenience of flexible abrupt adjustment. The game also has in it Demigods, a few of the areas having large living beings who actually involve a bit of skillful or thoughtful interaction. There are unfortunately only a few of them and they make up little of the total play time, but for these encounters you might have to do something like tail a Demigod through a slightly challenging flight path or even fly into a giant Leviathan and keep your bearings inside while also breaking pieces off its body to earn its attention.

 

With the Demigods, the game certainly feels more like a game as you have a clear goal that requires some meaningful involvement of the player rather than brief rope breaking or fly through the gate, but the game oddly enough could have done better by either completely removing these or making these the sole focus. If InnerSpace wanted to make the game more involved there should be more moments like this, but if it wanted it to be mellow exploration it unfortunately holds too much back. It tries to get you to both somehow enjoy open-ended freedom but locks you into areas that demand certain activities be performed for it to surrender more than the basic small settings with about as much going on in them as your typical snow globe.

THE VERDICT: InnerSpace makes a critical error in its attempt to combine leisurely exploration with goal-oriented gameplay. The worlds found within The Inverse are visually impressive on first blush, but once you start flying in them they’re barren and offer little for your plane to fly past or through to keep the player interested, after which they’ll need to find whatever small part of the wide empty world hides what they need to continue to a separate shallow bubble of space. The flight controls work well and the Demigod moments actually inject some decent gameplay in, but so much of the game feels like the exploration angle was added just to draw attention away from how dull, lifeless, and limited the worlds are. It barely feels like you’re interacting with the world or doing anything meaningful there, and taking the time to look around will just fill your eyes with very basic landscapes not strong enough to support anything save the shortest of tours.

 

And so, I give InnerSpace for the Xbox One…

A TERRIBLE rating. Despite my harsh words for it, I appreciate what InnerSpace clearly tried to do. On its self-run wiki it even says it attempts to find the blend between areas we want to explore in video games and the focused narratives that don’t often give us the chance to stop and smell the flowers. The problem is, there aren’t really many flowers here to stop and smell, and since the game has to sequester its progression goals away to try an encourage you to look around and just enjoy the feel of its worlds, you instead are likely to get frustrated as you fly around the same generic mountains or underwater tunnels in the hopes something new is hiding around the next rock. Your enjoyment of the game will likely increase or decrease based on how quickly you can find the way to the next area or find the hidden relics that serve as your only real reward for exploration, but no matter the speed of your experience, the substance remains quite lacking. Most areas throw their big interesting landmark in your face as you enter and the rest to explore is usually generic geography or the machines of The Ancients that also don’t change in design enough to stay intriguing. Save for the Demigods engaging the good flight controls, you’ll find little to do but bumble into whatever looks interactive and hope it has an actual impact on the world.

 

Some games can mix two ideas very well, but InnerSpace’s open exploration and progression-focused linearity instead borrow the aspects from each other that make their focuses fail. Exploration isn’t very enjoyable when its limited both visually and in what activities can feed into it, and progression isn’t great when it’s tied to ill-defined goals that require more time and luck than active involvement or consideration. There is hope for a design like InnerSpace’s, but both sides of the game’s design need to have the fleshed out elements people like in them while knowing what to discard to make the relationship at least harmonious instead of a mess.