Hands-On: The InnerFriend

Let’s switch gears a little – how about an indie horror game? The InnerFriend is a console-bound project out of PLAYMIND, a Quebec-based digital media company that’s taking a crack at high-concept horror. The company describes their new game as follows:

Led by a mysterious Shadow, face fears and nightmares inhabiting its materialized subconscious universe. Diving into a unique and eerie world, relive the Shadow’s childhood memories, collecting them to restore what was once its safe haven. Journey always deeper through the subconscious, unravel a rich but wordless story and encounter gruesome beings, whom it is necessary to escape.

The game puts you in control of a translucent avatar in the world of the InnerFriend, and you are tasked with journeying through this world and conquering the scary adversaries in your path. The demo we played drops you into a spooky hair salon, filled with secrets and inhabited by a strange creature with barber’s shears who really wants you dead. This creature will chase you around the level, and if it catches up with you, well…bad things happen. Thankfully, you can keep the monster at bay by shattering certain vanity mirrors scattered around the salon, and this cycle of exploration, fleeing, and mirror-shattering forms the entirety of the gameplay in the demo.

Ultimately, this means the level is relatively simplistic. To a certain degree, this makes sense, as less-complicated mechanics will place more of an emphasis on the atmosphere and scares. PLAYMIND promises many additional stages with more varied gameplay and unique gimmicks, so other levels may be more complicated, but the salon level gives you just three controls in total: walk, jump, and smash a mirror through sheer force of will.

If nothing else, The InnerFriend seems to have a handle on its creepy atmosphere. The salon stage was appropriately dark and unsettling, with objects toppling over randomly and lifeless mannequins lying around where you least expect them. These elements of a horror game can be difficult to demo in the middle of a loud convention, however, so the visuals and sounds will likely have more of an impact late at night with the lights off. For as interesting and ambitious as the story sounds, it didn’t quite come across that way in the demo, which more or less throws you into the experience with no explanation of what’s happening. Studio reps informed us that the story is told purely through visuals, with no dialogue or text to be found, and that the full game conveys this much better than a one-level slice of the experience; we’ll have to wait for release to find out if that’s true.

The InnerFriend will be available later this year for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.