Inner Voice

Inner Voice is a gloomy walking simulator that leads you through the nightmares of Mr. Booker. The game is broken into four chapters which each take place in a different setting, all related to his personal history. The constant thread that runs from beginning to end is the gentle voice of Magnus White who guides you along the way. Booker is plagued by the loss of his wife and is traumatized by violence in his past. I could not form a completed narrative in my mind. Instead, I have impressions and brief visions of highly unsettling events. This is compounded by the presence of ghostly figures and twisted mannequins that form a part of the backdrop. I admit jumping out of my chair more than once! Prepare to do a lot of walking. In some areas, it is not clear what you are looking for so you may end up circling multiple times as you determine where to go next. This is somewhat mitigated by an objective that is displayed on demand. Some objectives are very clear (“find the mine opening”) while others are a bit vague (“seek the truth”). The landscape is large and most areas have very few active objects. There are a handful of items to find which are automatically used when needed. While keys have an obvious use, the rest of the items do not appear to have a function. In truth, they are necessary to open new doors and progress the story. Inner Voice does not save your position within a chapter. Once a chapter has been completed, you can select it to replay. If you exit while in the middle of a chapter, you will return to the beginning of that chapter. This was not a problem during my first playthrough, but it became a tad irritating as I replayed specific chapters looking for missed achievements. Steam Achievements are supported and most are earned by completing the game. Other achievements are tied to alternate endings which require replaying the last chapter. Despite much investigation on my part and some hints in the forum, two achievements remain elusive (including the “secret” ending mentioned on the Steam store page). The Steam store page also mentions that player choices have an impact on the story. While it is possible that I unknowingly made navigation decisions along the way that changed my journey, I am only aware of one explicit choice at the very end of the game. The developer, X Interactive, has been very responsive to player feedback and is already making improvements. Some additional text related to objectives, found items, and closed doors will be helpful. I also hope that a save system is introduced to allow you to stop in the middle of a chapter without losing progress. If you enjoy walking simulators with a story, then I would recommend Inner Voice. It has a dark and creepy atmosphere. It strongly hints at violence but does not have explicit scenes and you are not chased or killed! It is not a perfectly polished game, but is a worthy addition to the genre and is enjoyable to play. [quote][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32732116-IndieGems/]Follow [b]IndieGems[/b] if you enjoyed this review and want to see more like it.[/url][/quote]

I’ve played through Chapter One so far, and I have to say: I am genuinely impressed :D The atmosphere is where this game really shines. It does an excellent job of building tension without overly relying on cheap scares. The environment, sound design, and pacing all work together to create a consistently unsettling experience. In terms of gameplay, it feels like a solid mix between a walking simulator and a light horror puzzle game. The puzzles are engaging enough to keep things interesting without breaking immersion, which fits the overall tone very well. The story and lore are also promising so far. Even in the first chapter, there’s enough intrigue to make you want to keep going and uncover what’s really happening. Performance-wise, it’s decent but not perfect. On default settings (everything set to Epic), I was getting around ~40 FPS instead of a stable 60. That said, I’m playing on Linux, so that may be a contributing factor rather than a direct issue with the game itself. Considering the price, this is absolutely worth it. If you enjoy atmospheric horror experiences with exploration and light puzzle elements, this is an easy recommendation.

I was underwhelmed. I can see the devs put some love into the game but it just did not resonant with me. I'm not entirely sure what the message was or what Booker's redemption was actually for. Not a bad game, but it was just missing something for me. I wish I could put a neutral review instead. The environment was mixed. Some of it was good, other parts looked a mess. The voice acting also wasn't terrible but also lacking. The music was good but would get randomly cut off as you moved on to the next room. Seems like it needs a bit more work.

That game gave me some real chills 😄 The puzzles are well spread throughout the game and hit a nice balance in difficulty: not too easy, not frustrating. If you enjoy horror walking simulators with light puzzle elements, I can definitely recommend this game.

A quiet, haunted thing — and worth listening to Inner Voice is not a game that grabs you. It pulls, slowly, like something whispering from the next room. I went in expecting a moody walking sim and came out a few hours later sitting in silence for a bit before I closed the laptop. That doesn't happen often. The art direction is one of the most distinctive things I've seen this year. It mixes Victorian decay with dusty Western emptiness in a way that shouldn't work and absolutely does — abandoned parlors bleeding into open plains, symbols scratched into objects you'd otherwise walk past. It's the kind of world that rewards looking at the wallpaper. Remarkable that this is a solo-developed project. It has the kind of singular voice you only get when one person carries an idea all the way through. Played to one ending so far. Going back in for the others.

If you enjoy exploration games I think you'd enjoy Inner Voice, if in doubt try the demo first :)

You are someone called Booker, walking down a dark path with nothing but a candle, and it eventually leads you to a small Western town, your hometown. The place is completely empty, yet it doesn’t feel abandoned or neglected. It feels more like everyone just vanished in an instant. Soon you learn there was an attack by shadowy creatures, and everything seems to point toward the nearby mine. The game is all about slowly moving through beautifully detailed locations, taking in the heavy atmosphere while the story unfolds in a subtle way. Most of it is left for you to piece together because there are no guides, waypoints, or on screen hints to break the immersion. It really feels like you are alone, figuring things out at your own pace. There is always a general objective, but reaching it is not always straightforward. You have to discover the right triggers on your own. Early on, for example, you wander through the town, stepping into houses and exploring until something finally pushes the story forward. Sometimes the game gently nudges you with invisible barriers or by locking doors behind you, but at other times it feels inconsistent. You might find yourself stopped by a simple open doorway for no clear reason, which can be frustrating. Progress comes partly from walking into the right place and partly from interacting with objects scattered around the world. Many of these objects have a faint outline, making them easy to spot even from a distance, especially in darker areas. Some only offer a short comment, while others can be picked. This is mostly reserved for keys. Moving forward can feel slow because the objectives are often vague and the interactions are not always clear. At one point you are told to turn “them” off, but you have no idea what that refers to. Eventually you realize it means several radios hidden around the area, and you have to track them down by following their sound. In another chapter, you are asked to place mannequins on specific spots, but one of those spots looks completely ordinary and is just a spot on the floor. Then, oddly enough, a later chapter suddenly introduces a visible waypoint for one objective, which feels out of place since nothing like that appeared earlier. Throughout the game, you hear commentary from two voices. One is your character, who rarely speaks, and the other is an unseen narrator. The narrator describes what is happening, shares details about the town’s former residents, and slowly reveals the bigger picture. Booker doesn’t appear to reacts t this voice, so it feels like it is meant just for you. It is worth adjusting your volume settings before playing. The voices are very quiet, almost forcing you to turn up the sound, which becomes a bit of a trap. Other noises are much louder and can startle you far more than expected. The narrator’s lines are tied to specific spots, and if you walk away before they finish, the audio will restart every time you pass through that area again. The shadow creatures appear occasionally, often darting across the screen for a quick scare or standing still with bright humanlike eyes glowing from within their dark forms. Some shadows feel harmless, almost like echoes of people who once lived there. Interestingly, you seem to be one of them as well, something you notice when you look down and see your own shadowy arm holding the candle. Another element in the game is the presence of mannequins. These humanlike figures sometimes appear in ways that subtly guide you forward. Despite the eerie setting, there is no real threat chasing you, and the horror aspect remains very light. Aside from interacting with objects, there are only a couple of real puzzles. The game is divided into four chapters. The first takes place in the semi open town, followed by a more linear mansion that leads you through rooms that twist and shift in unusual ways. The third chapter returns to a village setting similar to the first, and the final one brings you back indoors with more strange, looping spaces. The last chapter also offers two different endings, giving you a reason to revisit it. Each chapter can take about an hour or more, mostly spent wandering and trying to figure out how to progress. One of the biggest issues is the lack of feedback. When you do something that unlocks the next step, the game does not show you what changed. You are left to wander again, searching for a path that might now be open. At times, you are not even given a clear objective, which can leave you completely unsure of what to do next. The third chapter highlights this problem the most. The layout of the village leads to a lot of backtracking, and without clear feedback, it becomes tiring. One of the worst moments involves lighting lanterns placed on tables. There are several of them, and only some trigger a short comment. That comment turns out to be important because you are only supposed to light the lanterns that produce it. If you miss that detail, you can easily get stuck with no idea why. To make things more difficult, there is no proper saving system. You cannot simply return to a previous checkpoint. If you need to quit or if the game closes unexpectedly, you have to restart the entire chapter from the main menu. That can mean losing a lot of time, especially after long stretches of slow exploration.

Very good narrative adventure game, with a very nice and somewhat surreal scenario. Technically the game has to present amazing graphics, also the dialogues are very good. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in games that offer a nice experience through the narration of an interesting story.

This game is terrific the atmosphere and the visuals are on point music flows beautifully. It provides you great edge of your seat moments and the puzzles were great not to simple great jump scares . This was an experience and I highly recommend this to people . 10/10 for me thank you for a great game. Can’t wait for your next project in

I wanted to take a brief look at the game yesterday evening and I found myself finishing the game in the middle of the night. Well, just to be clear, this is less of a game than an intense experience. It reminded me strongly of the nightmares I used to have as a child. Dim light, loneliness, abandoned places, the architecture… although it’s hard to say where the eerie atmosphere really comes from, it triggered all those feelings I experienced during my nightmares in my childhood. Uncanny sensations created from common buildings, environments and objects. The game plays with your mind and your emotions in a subtle way, similar to works like The Stanley Parable, Twin Peaks, Blair Witch Project, the Backrooms or Shining. You experience loneliness, an eerie kind of nostalgia, claustrophobia, a hard to define feeling of being in the wrong place, dreaming a bad dream, spiced with an occasional jump scare, placed so well that it got me every time. The puzzles are rather easy to solve and serve more as a guideline for the story. The great graphics and sounds contribute to the immersive atmosphere, the Unreal Engine did a really good job there, which was used in a creative way in this game. The sounds and the music a great and I strongly recommend playing the game in the dark at night with headphones on. So if you are a great fan of dark, intense, uncanny and hard to grasp atmosphere like David Lynch managed to create, this is absolutely worth a look!