There are some things that are guaranteed to make my skin crawl and in short, terrify me. At the top of the list are old, dark abandoned prisons filled with disembodied voices and spirit-like apparitions. After only a few minutes it was clear that Inmates, a psychological horror game developed by Davit Andreasyan, was going to have all of these things. Is it any good, and more importantly am I going to be brave enough to play through it without losing bladder control.
As Jonathan, the story starts with you being at the bottom of a large stone pit with a spiral staircase going all the way to the top. On your near endless ascent, a bell tolls and you nearly lose your footing. Once you’re at the top, there’s nothing except the bell. You pull the cord, the bell rings and you fall all the way to the bottom and beyond, eventually waking up in prison.
Now this prison is not a standard and well-kept penal institution. It’s old, dark and abandoned, Yay! It isn’t too long before you find diary’s written by a child and a radio message to you telling you that your wife is in danger.
There’s not much pre-ample or detailed story to wade through before your walking through the prison. Certain puzzles, or rather their completion will push the story on a little further. Though don’t expect a complex and deep storyline as the whole game can be completed within a couple of hours.
Inmates is a horror based walking simulator. As you walk through the prison, there are puzzles that block your path, that slowly unlock the different levels of the prison. Apart from the puzzle solving objects, your only objects are the matches liberally littered throughout the prison that are your only source of light, and a child’s ‘colourful’ diary that you only choose to read through at given points within the game.
Ah, but is it actually scary? Well, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. For a game stated as a psychological horror there are definitely pros and cons. The environment is certainly themed quite well, dirty toilets, broken cells, satanic and religious iconography littered about. Not to mention the ghostly child and bald graphically-glitching men also popping up here and there. It does start to set the tone quite nicely.
Having no weapons and no ability to run both adds and detracts away from the scary experience. At first knowing you have to walk and that you’re unarmed adds a certain level of fear, until you realise that with no ability in the game to do either you’re not going to be in any position where those things are required. Sure there are jump scares and a certain level of unease, but again once you know that scares are generally programmed to happen after new things (puzzle solves, new locations etc.) if you’re wondering around somewhere you’ve already been, there’s little to no chance anything scary will happen.
Horror is of course subjective, I was pant-wettingly uneasy until I started to spot the patterns of the game, and then there was only a few jump scares pushing me forward.
Despite Inmates using the Unreal engine, there are games that have done this a little better. Luckily for this game, the vast majority of these imperfections are hidden being darkened rooms or corridors. I wouldn’t say that the graphics are badly done, just that there are better examples out there.
The sound in Inmates does a bit better job. There’s no music to detract away from the uneasy feeling in Inmates. There’s the near silence of the prison, with the odd drip of water or disembodied footsteps, suddenly pierced by chilling voices, or childlike cries. There’s definitely a mentality of less-equals-more, when it comes to the sound.
Inmates is not a difficult game, which for a game as short as it is, works for and against it. You wouldn’t want the game’s length masked behind a few insanely difficult puzzles, but you’ll find yourself breezing through the game in the best part of an afternoon without any real difficulty.
Unfortunately, there’s probably not much of a reason to play through Inmates again. There are only 12 achievements and most, if not all of them are gained simply be progressing through the story. So, there’s no real achievement quality to them. The story only ever plays out one way, and the jump scares and story shocks will be virtually non-existent the second time around. Once completed, I’d be very surprised if you thought of it again.
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Jim Franklin
Jim Franklin is a freelance writer, living in Derby UK with his wife and his player 3. When time allows he likes nothing more than losing himself in a multi-hour gaming session. He likes most games and will play anything but prefers MMO's, and sandbox RPG's.
