The Inner Friend by developer and publisher PLAYMIND—PC (Steam) review written by Richard with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
How many of you remember your childhood traumas? How about an imaginary friend? And what about your fears? Well, you can face all of these with your Inner Friend.
The Inner Friend is a journey through what I would presume to be childhood traumas. Taking control of a human shaped child made of what looks like paper maché, you need to explore those unresolved childhood fears of yours. While most of the stages you progress through can definitely be relatable traumas, some of them are distinctly more confusing, and I was starting to wonder if the "host" for the traumas wasn't irrationally scared of pretty much everything. School I can understand, the hospital I can understand, and kudos for the "enemies" not being creepy doctors but sick patients, which is maybe a little too apt in today's global current situation. The "ruins" and the "art gallery" however? A little less creepy, a little more confusing.
As a paper puppet it is your job to basically walk through the memories involved in the traumas, finding memories and helping a "spirit" get through the memories with you. Sometimes this is as simple as finding the spirit, sometimes you play mini games in an electric forest, and sometimes you run away from an evil monster, but mostly you explore a memory, with the goal being to "get through" the trauma. Along the way there are collectibles to find, objects that you can store the essence of and pictures associated with the stages you traverse, which you can decorate your room with, which is a sort of hub you return to sort-of-mostly-kind-of between traumas. To explain that dumb sounding sentence, you need to know that you start off walking through a hole in the wall, and then you start falling onto cube buildings below you. Walking through a "floor door" will bring you into a trauma. Complete the trauma and you return. Or at least you do for about half of the memories, the other half are chained together, for no real reason I could figure out, other than the parking lot and hospital stages.
Arguably my biggest gripe with The Inner Friend is the fact that after about ten minutes, any sort of fear was replaced with either eeriness, confusion, or frustration depending on the stage. It could have been really spooky, but I learnt pretty quickly that the darkness is more frustrating to spot stuff you're trying to get over, none of the "monsters" of the trauma really do a lot to you, at least in the beginning, and the game kind of has a "break" halfway through where the spooky takes a break for you to play mini games and do an escort mission with the spirit child. Do the stages have that fearful ambiance? Yes, some of them do. The school and salon made me think I would rather not be there, although the latter turned into that awkward frustration bit about halfway through, before returning to spooky territory near the end.
While the gameplay doesn't really lend itself to the atmosphere as much as it could, the music was pretty much the driving factor for me in the ambiance department. The graphics are pretty good for what I was otherwise expecting, and some of the monsters and scenes are pretty spooky. What was pretty annoying however was the "falling onto buildings" section that happened in between resolving traumas. It was a little frustrating to control, and the hitboxes were wonky while fall/gliding. The game is also incredibly short, as I completed the whole thing in a few hours, so if you were looking for a longer more in-depth experience, you probably aren't going to find it here. That being said, while short the experience definitely left me with an impression. What that impression is might still be up for debate, but it was definitely on the more positive side.
The Inner Friend puts me in a weird place for giving a score to. On the one hand, the controls can be super clunky, some segments can be extremely short and under-utilized, while others wear on you pretty fast, the puzzles are quite simple or frustrating depending, and the whole experience feels slightly disjointed, and rather short, which it is. On the other hand, I never got truly frustrated or disappointed with The Inner Friend. Heck, I get frustrated with some of the games I absolutely love, so that's a positive. The Inner Friend feels like it has a lot of potential that it just simply doesn't capitalize on. A little refinement would go a long way with any future titles.
Overall, the experience from The Inner Friend felt distinctly lacking, if not at least positive. The game is way too short, some of the areas felt either way too long (the ruins) or way too short (the mall literally took me less than 2 minutes to finish), and more often than not, just when a stage was reaching its end did I really start getting into it. The Inner Friend also suffers from a bit of a "genre disorder" halfway through, as it turns into less spooky, more weird mini games and escorting without the same eerie feeling, and some rather clunky handling on occasion. There was a lot that felt unfurnished and unexplored, and The Inner Friend would have really benefited from some refining and expansion to the different themes explored.
Score: 6.5 / 10
