I've Played and Reviewed Hundreds of Games, But Inside Is the Closest Thing to ‘Perfect’ I’ve Ever Played

This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century. Inside. Holy shit. That’s still the first thing that comes to mind when I think about that game. It has now been 10 years since it was released… as an Xbox exclusive. I expect most people probably don’t remember this, but Inside was, for a brief few days in late June/early July 2016, only available on Xbox One. It then released the following week on PC, but it would be almost two months until it arrived on PS4 at the end of August. While Inside was eventually available to play almost everywhere, it’s worth remembering that it was the long-awaited follow-up to 2010’s Limbo, itself one of the best games of the Xbox 360 era and one of the defining games of the brilliant Xbox Live Arcade downloadable-game initiative. If you ask me what my favorite XBLA game ever is, my answer was and probably still is Limbo. It was that incredible a game. And so once the notoriously meticulous de