INMOST 

This is a game about pain.

From the first scene, pain is everywhere. Those black monsters, like Slime, lurk in every corner of the world, and if the protagonist accidentally steps into its attack range, it will be killed in an instant. Death is an everyday occurrence in this game. Fortunately, the penalty for failure is not high, and the protagonist is resurrected shortly before death to face the threat again.

Trust me, it doesn't make it any less painful.

It's a narration-driven game featuring three main characters: Adam, a middle-aged man, Elizabeth, a young girl, and an unnamed knight with a sword and armor. The three control methods are very different: Adam can jump and roll freely, but his hands are not strong enough to fight; Unable to jump, Elizabeth uses objects to explore and reach high places; The Nameless Knight is similarly unable to jump, but he can not only carry out various attacks, but also move quickly in both horizontal and vertical directions with the help of hooks.

These three manipulations lead to three kinds of gameplay: Adam needs to collect items, dodge enemies, or use various traps and not really agile skills to solve the enemy, while exploring a witch's castle; Elizabeth needs to rack her brains and use all kinds of furniture to reach all corners of the house, searching for the terrible truth hidden in the various rooms; The part of the Nameless Knight is focused on fighting, and he needs to face numerous enemies again and again, collecting crystals of pain, on the one hand, to give to the giant black creature, on the other hand, after losing his own soul flower, trying to win the soul flower of others.

The process of the game is constantly switching between the three: the Galaxy City bridge, which is fraught with crisis and may be killed at any time, and the simple exploration of the same scene, as well as the action scenes that are overwhelming and refreshing. The slow and urgent game paragraphs make the whole process appear very rich, and the players will not feel tired; However, this frequent switching of the protagonist and gameplay levels has a consistent theme underneath and a connected story.

Pain exists in every stage of life, in every aspect of life, can not get rid of, can not escape, can only bear.

When you are young (Elizabeth), you face indifference and violence from adults (even those close to you), and fear from the unknown. When you are old (Adam), you must face the deterioration of your mobility and the inevitability of death; Even in the prime of his life (the nameless knight), he still has to face endless battles, despair that cannot be filled like a black hole, and the flower of another's soul that he cannot pluck.

Everyone has their share of pain, and others may not even realize it exists.

This frequent point of view switching not only makes sense at the gameplay level, but is also crucial for the narrative. The three protagonists' respective story lines are scattered with fragments of the whole story, and only when they come to the end, the three lines will be gathered together to reveal the whole story. However, during the course of the game, the three storylines also refer to each other. During Adam's quest, he meets a guardian who tells the backstory of the Unknown Knight's adventure, based on the number of crystals Adam has collected. In Elizabeth's story, there will be a man who looks like Adam, a nameless knight, and a creature that resembles a dark shadow in a witch's castle; As for the story of the unknown knight, it is a metaphor for the truth of the riddle with the fantasy setting.

In the story told by the Guardian, the unknown knight loses his soul flower, causing the witch to become so angry that the knight embarks on a journey to retrieve a soul flower that once belonged to someone else. But the flower always refused him, so he had to turn to face his own inner pain, collecting crystals again and again, and presenting them to the pain's materialized personality: the enormous, monster-like black figure.

But this sacrifice did not make his despair any less, and the huge black shadow was like a black hole, swallowing up all his efforts, even eroding his body, and gradually turning him from a knight in armor to another dark monster.

Elizabeth's story, on the other hand, is equally depressing. She lives with a woman who seems to be her mother, but who is indifferent to her and may even resort to violence; The men of the family rarely return home, sometimes appearing outside the door in the form of an unknown knight, sometimes in the form of a dark figure. In the course of her own adventure, Elizabeth gradually reached the various rooms of the house, and finally, with her own wisdom, reached the attic on the top floor and found a hidden room with various children's toys. Although there are no kidnapped children on the roof, as Elizabeth imagined, the existence of these toys does not mean that Elizabeth herself was kidnapped here by this man and woman? If not, whose toys are these?

At the end of Adam's story, he finally catches up with the white fox that runs through the second half of the journey, transforms into a white shadow, and gives the flower of his soul to Adam, who also becomes a white shadow; At the end of the story of the Nameless Knight, he finally kills the serpent released by the giant shadow, but does not die at the hands of the shadow; In the end of Elizabeth's story, the woman finally spared Elizabeth after killing the man, and she was about to fall from the tall building, but also for the grandfather came to save.

The truth is finally revealed in this nearly 20-minute cutscene.

A man and a woman once had a daughter, but the daughter chose to commit suicide after being bullied by her peers. The man was blocked by a door, and failed to save his daughter. Woman have been depressed ever since, man numbed himself by work. Later, the man rescues a baby girl in a burning building and raises her as his own, but he is never able to get her acception. At the same time, the woman finally can not bear the pain of losing her daughter, gradually collapse, she has always been unable to face the adopted daughter, and finally choose to die with the man, but did not have the heart to take the life of the adopted daughter, but after calling her father-in-law, she swallowed her last breath. The father-in-law tried his best to save the granddaughter who also fell from the balcony, and did not follow the granddaughter's steps.

Among the three story lines of the game, there are true and false, virtual and real, but all show the side of the story from different angles. The main content of the game is Adam's story, which is actually the grandfather telling his adopted granddaughter everything that happened in the past in the form of a story. Adam finally picked up the soul flower and reconciled with the white Fox, perhaps representing a good wish of the grandfather for his son and daughter-in-law. The story of the nameless knight in the mouth of the Guardian is a microcosm of the man's fate: he loses the flower of his soul (the birth daughter), is hated by the witch (the wife), tries to remove the flower of his soul that does not belong to him (the adopted daughter), and after failing, he has to face the great pain in his heart (the great shadow). Finally kill the dragon (witch/wife) and take the flower of the soul (adopted daughter). Whether it's Adam or the nameless knight, or the protagonist of Grandfather's story, and the protagonist of another story told by the Guardian in this story. The real reality, in fact, is Elizabeth's story. In these three nested stories, there are both metaphors for reality and good wishes to reverse reality. Only by connecting them together can we truly understand the core expression of the story.

Each of us has our own pain and despair, and we all have to face the great, omnipresent, invincible shadow.

But this is not the end of the story, nor the whole life.

When the nameless knight fought and failed again and again, he finally put down his weapon and stopped killing the black figures, and these figures also offered their soul flowers, and then turned into a white light and disappeared. When Adam went through all the hardships and caught up with the white Fox, he finally took off the flower of the other side's soul. When the grandfather jumped from the tall building and hugged the girl tightly, he finally resolved the ice in her heart.

In the face of pain, there is an alternative. Is to take someone else's pain into your own heart. The so-called flower of the soul in the game is both the nourishment of the huge dark shadow, but also can make the dark shadow into a white light. This flower of the soul is the pain of each of us. You can choose to bear it all alone, and gradually become a shadow in the process, or you can choose to actively give it to another person, choose to trust that the other person can bear their pain.

And by accepting and accepting the pain of others, we can nurture the warmest thing in this hopeless world: love.

INMOST's story is difficult to link up after a single clearance, and many metaphors and details are hidden in the process, for example, the little girl Adam met in the well and the tunnel at the beginning is actually the daughter of a man. And when Adam jumps to get into the well, he's bound to knock her into the pit. At this point, she would begin to SOB and even feel sorry for herself. The first time you play here, you may be completely unaware of her identity, but the second time you arrive here, you can realize that this place has been foreshadowed.

And this is the charm of this game, the three story lines have their own characteristics, different gameplay mechanisms, different narrative rhythms, and naturally different weight in the process, but the reality and fantasy cut, but never deviate from the heavy theme of this game, but make full use of the advantages of video games in the interactive level, the escape, suspense, combat and other elements interwoven together. The rich gameplay shows the choices people make when facing the same survival dilemma. When you try to put all the clues together and come up with your own interpretation, you can understand what the whole story is trying to say.

At the end of the story, Elizabeth, now a grown woman, walks over to the bench, sits down next to her grandfather, takes his hand, and says,"Do you remember? The one about pain? I was wrong. It's a story about love. Let me tell you again."

It is because of love that we suffer.

Only by placing someone else's pain in your heart and melting it with all your own temperature can you regain love.

When we are trapped in pain, we can understand depression, we can understand hatred. As we say," Don't persuade others to be good without suffering." Of course, people can blame, can hate. They will even take kill, suicide as response because they have pain as the sheild. But at the same time, giving pain in return for pain leaves us with nothing. Are there other ways we can cope? I think so. We can choose redemption. We can choose reconciliation. We have more choices, and they can lead to better results. What if the daughter choose to hold on? What if the woman choose to start a new life? What if the man can care more about the girl? Things would be greatly changed.

That's what I think also the value of this kind of games. That's what I say,"people are moral beings." From the depressive, dark story, we see the alternatives. We try to make changes. And as we are trying to do so, our thoughts get deeper, our moral cognitions get improved. Just like the grandfather said,"Do you remember? The one about pain? I was wrong. It's a story about love. Let me tell you again."

I watched a video about this game and I'd like to use a sentence in that video as an end of my blog -- "Flowers that have withered will no longer take root, the flowers that remain, however, have various ways to bloom"

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留下来的花，有百般开法【Inmost】_剧情 (bilibili.com)