Innerspace Review
- Innerspace
- Developer- Polyknights
- Publisher- Aspyr Media
- Switch, PC, PS4, Xbox One
Innerspace is beautiful. Soaked in a palette of aqua, burnt sienna, gold and purple, Innerspace feels like a pastel filtered rendition of a sci-fi novel cover. Monuments of a past civilization reach across its landscapes, and waves crash across bodies of water that are both the ocean and the sky. There is no up here–earth and sea wrap around to create a world with no end. There’s no boundaries to reach, only deeper spaces to explore. And here is where both its wonders and frustrations begin.
At its heart, Innerspace is a simple exploratory game. Spaces exist for their own sake, and are rendered with allusions to a greater world. The best of these are the collectible relics that are the focus of the game. These eventually unlock keys that move you to new areas, or upgrade your craft, but most of them seem to exist for their own sake. They’re contraptions or plants that can be chipped at to uncover, or assembled to give some idea of what their original purpose was. This is Innerspace at its best, where the heft of each object and the accompanying flavor text gives the world weight. I looked forward to collecting these for their own sake, and the increasingly frequent pulses of the Joy-cons as I approached one were their own joy.
The world these artifacts are housed in never felt as tangible. The brilliant palette gave the world a pleasant atmosphere to soar in, but its also responsible for the way the forms of the world blend together. The fish eye view needed to navigate Innerspace’s spherical worlds already distorts the edges of each object, and the relative lack of shadow and hard edges make it difficult to separate objects at a distance. Your ship also pulls further and closer when adjusting speed, but instead of giving the sense of changing velocity they work with changes in the FOV in a way that prevented me from ever gaining a proper sense of my relative distance to world. At times this creates and almost dolly zoom effect, where it seems as if you and the world are being torn in different directions. In TV mode this combined with frame rate dips that made me feel motion sick, making the already hard to navigate world even more dizzying. I felt the effect less in portable mode–maybe the smaller screen reduced the effect, or just made it harder to notice frame drops.
Beyond that, there didn’t feel like there was a lot of pleasure in the act of navigating the world. The dreamlike colors and atmosphere washed over me well enough, but when I was asked to do more than coast across it the dream fell apart. There’s a set of drifts, dives, and boosts, and they’re all functional, but they don’t carry any weight and the already temperamental nature of flying becomes painful when I was asked to navigate tight spaces. Whether I hit the boost or the brake, I never felt like I was going at the right speed to maneuver its enclosed areas. Which mean a lot of being thrown around as I collided into walls, sending the camera spinning and making it even harder to get my bearings.
There are moments in Innerspace, where I’m set adrift in the cascading waves of sea and sky, or tinkering with some recovered artifact to uncover a story, where it feels wondrous. These moments sell me on the promise of its history, and the stories it has to tell. But too often Innerspace asked me to navigate without direction, or perform stunts in an uncooperative craft. I found myself wandering, not in the color and space of its world, but in my thoughts.