I just finished inside and wanted to see how people felt about it in 2023. Everything I’ve read about it around 2016-2017 seems to regard it as the best game of the year and in some cases one of the best of all time. It’s this truly still the consensus?
I’d argue it’s worse than TOTK. I completely get your point that they’re wildly different, but INSIDE doesn’t feel as overall “fun” to me at any point as BOTW or TOTK. I think there was only one real flaw with INSIDE; the way in which you solve puzzles can be sort of tedious. One thing I really liked about The Witness was that, despite the fact that some things were hidden or convoluted, it was rarely a stupid long walk just to complete the puzzle. INSIDE featured that a number of times. Sometimes the puzzle’s solution was obvious, but I was still running around for minutes just doing the legwork. I feel there should be instant gratification for the puzzle’s solutions, sometimes solving them didn’t even feel good because I had spent too long trying to actually get the game to recognize I had completed the puzzle even though I had figured it out