The Inner Friend Review – PC

The Inner Friend is the latest indie adventure that probes the mind of a disturbed child as viewed from the perspective of a porcelain-skin, mannequin that you control throughout several short adventures. During your travels you’ll hopefully uncover the root of your fears and troubled memories as well as collect numerous childhood artifacts that you can restore to their proper location within your bedroom central hub.

The presentation is perhaps the game’s strongest element, using a “less is more” approach to storytelling. There is no dialogue, leaving you to infer the narrative from what is visually unfolding on the screen. The score is fantastic, setting up all sorts of emotional and thematic elements while maintaining just the right amount of edginess.   I wouldn’t call the game a “horror” adventure, but there are a couple of jump scares and a super-creepy psycho that chases you throughout a mirror level.

Most of the game is casually wandering around the fairly linear levels collecting anything you can and solving the occasional puzzles like blocking red energy beams emitting from a devilish teacher that are trapping students in a classroom. As you explore you will find various childhood items like a ball or a baseball bat or even a classic Atari 2600-style joystick. You can return these items to your bedroom between levels as well as any discovered pencil art drawing to reassemble a large mural on your wall.

In one of the game’s more interesting repeated moments you exit your bedroom through a crack in the wall and being to fly in a dreamlike state over a world of stacked buildings. You can steer and dive down and enter any of the buildings to find a lit floor panel that will activate the next chapter in the game. It’s a small but cool part of the game that ultimately sells the surreal world of The Inner Friend.

Each level has a unique theme; one is set in a school, another in a hospital, and there is one in a museum with these crazy Medusa death rays that you have to avoid by hiding in shadows. Another level has you running through tunnels while being chased by some shadowy wolf creature. One of the most terrifying levels has you being chased by a crazed barber in some sort of backstage dressing room area. There is a good mix of puzzle-solving, item collection and even a dash of platforming when you start jumping on floating hospital beds.

Technically, The Inner Friend is as polished as any AAA game with indoor and outdoor levels that look like something out of the movie, What Dreams May Come. I was blown away with the design of the main character that looked like a porcelain mannequin with bits and pieces chipped away, but he was always in a constant state of getting repaired and torn back down. The overall tone of the game is dark with graphics to match, which allowed the designers to make great use of lighting to shift your focus and add extra tension. Combined with the cinematic score this game is a perfect blend of Inception and the Twilight Zone.

It took me 2.6 hours to finish the game and that was with me missing several artifacts and also getting stuck for nearly 20 minutes while I totally over-analyzed an electrical plant puzzle that ultimately turned out to be a game of Simon. While it is easy to “die” in a few places the game checkpoints often so it never gets frustrating. I’m guessing there is at least another hour of replayability if I wanted to go and get the rest of my toys, and the game offers up a nice chapter select menu that actually shows how many toys and mural pages are left in each level; kudos to the designers for this quality of life feature.

Regularly priced at $15, the brevity of the game may make budget gamers wait for a sale, but if you want to get a jump on the Halloween spirit there are plenty of supernatural thrills and chills should you decide to hang out with The Inner Friend. It’s fun, clever, and even a bit frightening, and one of my favorite indie adventures of the summer.

Author: Mark Smith
I've been an avid gamer since I stumbled upon ZORK running in my local Radio Shack in 1980. Ten years later I was working for Sierra Online. Since then I've owned nearly every game system and most of the games to go with them. Not sure if 40+ years of gaming qualifies me to write reviews, but I do it anyway.

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