In Between is a very solid puzzle platformer about dying, and one of my favorite blind buys of recent years.

The puzzle platformer seems like the ‘default’ genre for a lot of indie developers looking to make a project on a tight budget with a small staff. It makes sense, since they can be made with limited numbers of assets and rely more on clever design than complex mechanics that need to be tested over and over and very finely tuned. It means, however, that during the current bloom of indie teams we also have a glut of puzzle platformers. Ever since the first indie puzzle platformer hits, like Braid and Limbo, they’ve been coming in a steady stream. There are dozens upon dozens of them on every system, varying wildly in quality and success. This means that there are a lot of bad or average games in the genre, as inexperienced teams cut their teeth and learn how to actually make a game from scratch, but also that a lot of good games get buried under the heavy hitters.

I’d never even heard of In Between until I stumbled on it during the big Xbox Black Friday sale. I was actually looking for cheap, short, palate cleanser games to play between the larger experiences, since I like to vary genres and styles, and at under $4 and less than 3 hours it seemed perfect, regardless of whether it was going to be actually good or only just okay. It’s hard to get too bored during a 3 hour game unless it’s utterly broken, and I’ve had a good time with short, less-than-amazing games like Ninja Pizza Girl (A slightly janky but charming enough little action platformer) in the past, so I decided to give In Between a try without knowing anything about it except that it was a short puzzle platformer with an appealing art style.

Having played through it under 24 hours I can now say that while In Between isn’t at the level of a Braid or an Inside, it is a cut above most of the recent entries in the genre, even the relatively competent ones like Toby: The Secret Mine. It’s not a game you absolutely have to play, but if you’re looking for a quiet, contemplative, game with some fun puzzles and a really solid narrative and aesthetic it fits the bill quite well.

In Between is a game about dying. Not just game death, with its endless cycles of defeat and respawn followed by triumph, but real, human, death. The protagonist is a father of a young daughter and, despite not smoking, has lung cancer. The game takes him through the various stages of grief, each represented by a different mechanic added to the basic puzzle platformer, while he narrates the story of his life and his feelings about his diagnosis. The actual gameplay is pretty simple. The character can run forwards or back on a 2D plane and the player can also change the orientation of gravity in the stage to either up, down, left, or right on the screen. The character cannot jump or attack or do anything besides run and push the occasional box, but clever and careful design choices mean that the game is never mechanically boring. If your character touches spikes or gets crushed by something falling towards him he dies and starts again from the beginning of the level or a checkpoint. There are switches to trigger and platforms that he can ‘wind’ forward and back, and some other basic hazards and elements of the stages (such as spiky balls that fall up and down as you switch gravity around.) Each of the major “worlds” is themed around a main mechanic like a darkness that encroaches from the left side of the screen unless your character is looking directly at it (in which case it retreats to the edge) or a mirror of your character played on a split screen, who does the opposite of whatever your character does until you can bring the two together and end the stage. The goal of each level is just to get to the end alive, but from these simple elements the game builds a series of interesting and engaging puzzles that kept me involved from the opening to the end credits.

The gameplay is smooth and polished, with things running just a touch faster than I’d like which makes some of the more intricate platforming parts tougher than they maybe need to be (unlike many puzzle platformers this game does require a certain level of reflexes and quick action, though it’s not too tough to navigate.) The puzzles are very well designed. I never got truly stuck, but a lot of them require some lateral thinking and careful planning to navigate. My chief complaint about the game is that the checkpointing can be a little stingy, with at most one checkpoint per level (the game is divided up into about 50 relatively short levels), which meant that if I was having trouble with a later part of a level I often had to play through a bunch of stuff to get back to the point that was vexing me. This got tiresome in levels that required a lot of complex manipulations to advance, but it never got so bad that I wasn’t enjoying myself, and wasn’t a major issue most of the time. It’s a well-made game with good puzzles, and if that’s all you’re looking for then I recommend it on that level.

What makes In Between more than just competent, however, is the narration. Though it’s from a German team it has full English voice acting (German too!) and the voice actor is excellent, with a deep, somber, tone that really conveys the character’s frustration and sadness at his impending death. The writing is very good, especially for game writing, and while the “plot” is nothing special, there’s real emotional heft to what’s going on. The game’s stained glass/comic book aesthetics also match the gameplay and story well, and it all fits together to create this propulsive narrative about a dying man coming to grips with his mortality. There are little memory tears in many levels and when you touch them they reveal some scene from the character’s past and a little detail about something like his relationship with his distant father or the ways he feels like he’s abandoning his wife and daughter. There’s a real feeling of isolation, sadness, and frustration that matches with the player’s own experience running the character through the small levels and dealing with the frustrations of a difficult puzzle or finnicky platforming area. Even retracing your steps over and over to get to a difficult puzzle seems resonant with the game’s themes of frustration and helplessness in the face of an unfair world. The music, which is also excellent though there aren’t many tracks, adds even more to the atmosphere, with beautiful but unsettling themes and string arrangements. Since it’s a contemplative game where you spend a lot of time just looking at a puzzle trying to figure out an approach good music is vital, and In Between has one of the best soundtracks I can remember for a game of this scope. All this creates a package that’s emotionally resonant without being maudlin, and fun despite its serious themes and muted tone. It’s not a game that will thrill you or bring a lot of joy, but it offers the mature pleasures of a piece of media that resonates with the player and brings us into the world of another human being to empathize and feel close, while also being enjoyable just as a puzzle game. It’s the perfect game for a quiet, rainy, afternoon, or a cold, snowy, evening. Games are often described as being “fun” and In Between is that if you like puzzles, but it’s also something perhaps more important. Satisfying.

In Between is not the best puzzle platformer I’ve ever played. It’s not some great achievement in game design that everyone needs to play as soon as possible. It’s just a really solid, well-designed, fun game that was just the right length (there are also some additional challenge levels you can skip at the end of each world if you want a bit more) for what I was personally looking for. The story resonated with me, the aesthetics were great, and the puzzles were at a perfect level to be challenging at times but never really frustrating. It’s the kind of game that’s easy to overlook, but even at the asking price of $12 it’s worth the money and time investment. Indie puzzle platformers sometimes feel more like student projects than games that a consumer would actually want to spend time with, but that’s not the case here. In Between is a game worth finding time for, and the rare game that tackles serious themes in a meaningful and resonant way.