*This text has been translated from Russian to English to celebrate the INMOST Anniversary*
It's been three years since the game's release on PC. Wow!
Thank you so much for all the support and love we have received from you!
The anniversary of INMOST’s release is approaching and I thought it would be a good time to share some of the game's secrets. I'll cover development details, interesting facts, and details you may have missed, or that you've been asking us about all these years…
If you haven't completed INMOST yet, I recommend you finish it before reading this post, as it contains a huge amount of spoilers that will tarnish your experience. Consider this a fair warning! ☠️
Fireplace Chimney
You probably remember the moment towards the end of the game when Lizzie meets the raccoon in the attic. She discovers that there is nothing unusual in the locked room; just some dusty, old junk.
She gets upset, but after a brief moment, Rabbit notices the fireplace chimney. However, there is no fireplace downstairs in the house!
I've seen many playthroughs of INMOST, and usually this moment works perfectly and players are hooked by the thought. They are surprised. They become curious.
The thing is, when I was developing the game, I got a kick out of that moment myself. There is a flue pipe, but no fireplace. So then where does it go?
Some of the art was created before the story was complete. However, the basic skeleton was written, the emotions that should be caused at this or that moment, but there were none of the finer details.
I had created the shadow animation in the attic for the announcement trailer, which came out two years before the game was completed.
I had added the chimney because I felt the roof seemed a bit barren. At the time, it had no meaning other than decorative.
Lizzie was supposed to get into the basement, but it wasn't spelled out exactly how. When I was initially planning the story, I had written a vague note that she was supposed to find a secret passage or something.
And then, as I was drawing more details in the house, the pieces seemed to come together.
My thought process went something like… The flue pipe! Why is it here? It probably leads to the basement! Why don't we allow Lizzie to break it? Yeah, the little girl moves the huge floor clock first (it used to be even bigger, by the way. I shrunk it down to make moving it a little less weird) and then she uses a crowbar to smash the wall..... BUT! It's a beautiful “Chekhov’s gun!” (narrative principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed.) The flue pipe was in plain sight the whole game!
And that's how this scene came together.
It's funny how when you look at a finished work - it seems like it was originally clearly planned out, carved in stone, and brought to life unchanged.
It reminds me of some sage words my fellow game dev friend likes to say "Video game development is when you drive a steam train and continuously throw tracks in front of it to keep going"
Jumpers
Little, long-eared cuties that live in a cave and bounce around squeaking like rubber toys.
The first version of INMOST, which came out on Apple Arcade, didn't have them. These locations, as well as the location to the left of the house with a scythe inside (where the puzzle with bells), were added during the Steam release.
But the jumpers have been mentioned before. The Storyteller talks about them:
All texts and all their variants in all languages from INMOST are stored within a Google Sheet. When something needs to be changed - they are exported to an XML file and imported into the game with one button. Very convenient.
The jumpers are the children. Ann's classmates.
The Storyteller tells the player that the pain wasn’t their fault. People I know have told me that this line is outrageous, but I really feel that way. Children are the product of the experiences that they have had with their parents and the people around them, and I truly believe it's not their fault.
However, there is an Achievement in the game for killing them all (which, by the way, is not that easy - these poor furry creatures scatter and hide after one of them dies). But, unlike the players who think of getting this Achievement, they are not heartless bastards. Therefore, after a few seconds, they gather at the body of the fallen comrade to mourn them. That's where you catch them and kick them in the head with your foot!
The Achievement is aptly named "Pain for Pain", and it was unlocked by 7.2% of players. Admit it, did you crush the poor jumpers?
Adam's brother
In development, you often have to juggle ideas and try to implement the best ones.
Unfortunately, this sometimes can mean that entire locations, scenes, and story arcs have to be abandoned.
However, some things (albeit partially) can remain in the final game (albeit having lost some of their relevance).
Adam’s first location was the basis for the demo, with which we won the Best Indie Game award at DevGAMM, and later helped us in our search for a publisher. This location ended with Hunter's chase scene. It's that black stuff over there that can kill a kitty.
I wanted to show that the world of the game isn't empty. That it had characters with their own stories.
At the time, the overall story and themes were still coming together. The world and the game's lore were still being born in a way. Whilst the general artistic direction was similar to the INMOST we know and love today, in many ways, it was still in its infancy and hadn’t quite found its true voice.
It was clear that the world of the Castle was a reflection of Adam (who at the time was still called Murray), and that all the characters were essentially all in his head. But what kind of characters are they? They have to be quite vibrant, with bright, distinct personalities. So my idea was to make the characters extensions of Adam’s complex thoughts, feelings and ideas about life.
The strange looking character in the house with the scythe is Adam's childhood fear and insecurity, and the character who gives him the Black Heart is his anger.
I had planned to populate the world with even more personified emotions, but the already-large amount of text slowed down the already-slow game, so this idea remained essentially unexplored.
But what about the brother of the strange character in the cabin - as you’ve likely guessed, it's a black goop monster to the left of the house which you lure out with bells later in the game. It was necessary to hang another Chekhov's Gun on the wall at the very beginning and to show the player that the world here is strange and dark, and existed before the player interacted with it. He tells Adam that he "helped his brother to hide" and asks not to look for him. This kind of wording sounds suspicious and creates a hook that hooks the player's interest and encourages them to explore the game's world.
Initially, I had a few notes that this character was supposed to be Adam's real brother who died as a child. I did not develop this plotline, so as not to introduce additional characters that do not affect the main story of the game.
And again about the fireplace!
The fall of objects, under the conditions of our planet, is independent of the mass of the object, as I hope you know. Which means that from the time it took for the object to fall we can calculate the height from which the object fell.
It takes about 3 seconds for Lizzie to fall down through the fireplace, which is A LOT.
This, of course, was done for dramatic effect. If it had been faster, it wouldn't have been as epic. But a 3-second fall is how many meters?
With our planet's gravity of 9.80665 g, a 3-second fall means that at the end of the fall, poor Lizzie had a velocity of 29.42 meters per second, which in turn means that she overcame a height of 44 meters. Which is comparable to the height of a twelve-story building.
So, first of all, it turns out that people went to a lot of trouble to dig up that basement… and secondly, that Lizzie is damn invincible!
Which also means the answer to the question "How they both survived the fall from the balcony at the end of the game" is very simple. Grandpa fell on the girl.
Let's give him a round of applause for his ingenuity. Even though he didn't know Lizzie was invincible.
Well, it raises some questions about his behaviour.
Knight, Keeper and prehistoric ferns
I’d also like to talk about Zack’s (the real world counterpart to The Knight) profession, who the Keeper is and why The Knight served him.
So, who is the Keeper?
Throughout the game, players will have been collecting shards of pain. Adam collects them humanely. He finds them hidden in the world, within the grass, underneath rocks, and inside boxes. Afterall, the Storyteller tells us that pain is hidden everywhere. That's the way it is in the world of INMOST.
In the real world, however, as someone who has read tons of fiction consistently throughout my life, I've always been interested in a rather unusual question. If you take a random pebble on a mountainside - how many things has it seen?
Rationally speaking, it probably didn't see much. It was sitting underground. Sitting. Sitting. And then boom, the slope collapsed and it crawled out. People were walking past it, and then I came and started asking, "What did you see, O wise stone?"
But there are different kinds of stones. I was born in a mining town which was surrounded by stone dumps called ‘slag heaps’. Slag is waste material that is created during the refining process, separated using heat, causing it to rise to the surface, creating huge mountains up to 30-50 meters high.
These dumps can continuously burn and smoulder for a long time after they’ve been dumped - because the temperature and pressure heaps sometimes look like small volcanoes.
Coal contains the energy stored by plants that lived hundreds of millions of years ago in swampy forests - prehistoric! Layers of dirt and rock covered the plants over millions of years. The resulting pressure and heat turned the plants into the substance we call coal. It is very easily broken by hand into very flat slates a few millimetres thick. Once I realized that, I was blown away. Every second stone has prehistoric prints on it. Literally, as in the photo below.
IN EVERY SECOND ONE.
This is the ancient world at your fingertips. Plants and even insects that lived in an ancient forest hundreds of millions of years ago. Can you imagine such a thing? It blew my childish mind. Right there in your hands, not in a glass case inside a museum. These are rocks that REMEMBER.
I guess sometimes they remember the pain, too…. but I'm getting distracted.
Well, here it is. Unlike Adam, who collects pain from knowing the world and the stones, Zach, the Knight, collects pain from people and delivers it to the Keeper.
I always thought the game explained the nature of the Keeper pretty well. In fact, I attempted to do so directly in the text at the ending.
The Keeper is life itself. The game explicitly says you don't have to fight it. Life doesn't feed off your pain. It's just there.
But the Knight's world is actually Lizzie's story. Knight is her perception of her adoptive father, in moments when she did not know it was a story about love, not pain. She only saw Knight's sacrifices as personal, self-interest, not concern for her. Therefore, she envisions the very life the Knight serves as being a horrible and unforgiving monster. And Life was indeed like that in the world she lived in as a child. The world as she saw it.
A Knight in this world harvests pain from other people.
Sometimes, the colours of the world around us are dimmed by our problems and there seems to be nothing we can do about it. The whole game is about that.
But I believe there's always a way out.
Zach has an extensive library in his office. On the walls hang framed awards he's forgotten about since he started taking care of Lizzie.
There was a detail in the early versions of the game that I regret we didn't realize to the end. Furniture began to gradually disappear while Lizzie's room became more tidy and filled with toys and children’s things.
After Astrid, Zach's wife, left, he was unable to continue his work, focusing only on taking care of Lizzie. He was in dire need of money, and so he started selling off furniture so that Lizzie would want for nothing.
Zach was a lawyer. He met people's pain directly and sometimes, unfortunately, was an asshole in situations where he wished he had behaved differently.
Zach was giving all of his pain to Life. He was trying to survive in this world of pain that surrounded him on all sides. But he was saving some of his pain for Lizzie to try and buy her happiness with it.
Knight was giving bits and pieces of the pain he stole from Life, to give to Flower to break down Flower's barrier that it had erected around itself. The Knight saw that by giving away the pain, the Flower's barrier responded, if only for a second. He then decided it was the only way.
But it wasn't what the Flower needed. Other people's pain, even in the form of gifts and care, is not always what loved ones need.
That's why, in the final of the game, Knight doesn't give away the pain. Flower never needed it.
He decides to take HER pain. The pain she already has. Pain that was already too much.
And that alone breaks Flower's barrier.
Zach accepts Lizzie's pain as his own.
Even at the very beginning of development, when I didn't even know the full plot of the game myself, I had the main idea. I wanted to leave a bittersweet feeling and maybe some melancholy after the credits. I wanted the player to think not only about themselves and their pain, but also about their loved ones and the pain they are trying to take away from us. To take away, trying to make our world a better place.
Around this thought, the whole plot of INMOST was born.
Astute players will have noticed that the Knight's Cave is an interpretation of Zach, Astrid and Annie's home. On the right, you can see a leaning refrigerator, and behind the Flower is the kitchen window. This is where Knight was returning to all along.
INMOST’s Biggest Mystery
When we were approaching the end of the game, after the main plot had already been developed and after over a million frames of cutscenes were drawn, there was one plot thread that a lot of people had not noticed.
INMOST is a game where the imagery is stronger than the real world.
Similar to when cartoons, movies, games, show the bars of a prison, through which it is quite obvious that the character can pass without problems and escape. However, they remain in prison.
And you know why?
Because if the creator adds realistic, multiple bars - the audience will not be able to see the character very well. With "movie" bars, audiences realize the prisoner in prison. They realize that the bars are very sparse and the prisoner can probably squeeze through them. Yet they suspend their disbelief and accept that as part of the action playing out in front of them.
I am immensely glad that you are reading this article and are curious about the development. It means that you have accepted the bars that have been laid out in INMOST.
But there is a thing that remains behind the scenes. For all the understatements that exist in the game.
It's pretty straightforward. It's always been in plain sight. But it was hidden beneath the emotions in the moment that cleverly covered it up. I think a lot of people wondered about it, but took the plot for granted. For which I am grateful.
Okay
So what is it?
I want to talk about why on earth Zach rescued Lizzie from the burning house.
Why was he there? Why did he run to the top apartment specifically? He wasn't a firefighter (and that version existed at some point in the script), nor was he a superhero throwing himself into the fire.
Why did he break into the house?
The answer lies a little ways away. And that answer is provided by one of the game's few comic characters.
You've seen him. You've almost certainly thought about who the character represents.
I'm talking, of course, about the Cartographer.
No, it's not a turkey. It's a sock on a hand.
During development, I used to play with a sock puppet with my three-year-old daughter.
The Cartographer is one of the first “mindfuck” characters that players meet. He said that he loves his teapot and tea, but he used to make tea from a straw. In the next scene playing as Lizzie, we meet the teapot with its straw. And maybe a caterpillar crawled in there, as Lizzie said. (It crawled out later. Don't worry.)
The Cartographer was important to connect Adam's world and Lizzie's world. It was necessary for the player to question where reality is, where fiction is, and how they relate to each other.
It even has its own unique soundtrack, which I believe consists of four notes with huge pauses in between.
Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop.
To me, this adds a separate humorous dimension to the character. But he is important, and he draws maps.
Most players don’t realize, but this is a real map that can be used in-game.
I was trying to confuse players. I drew some spruces on the map. I drew the lighthouse. But I also drew a skeleton. And in the middle, it is a little heart. Do you see it? It's a black heart item used to open doors.
Below, in the vertical tunnel, there is a wall that can be knocked down using the pickaxe and behind it is the last collectable. The last memory, which answers the question as to why Zack broke into the burning house.
Here it is:
Lizzie is still very young in this picture. She's in her mother's arms. Ann is much older than Lizzie. This photo was taken many years ago.
Lizzie's father was Zach's closest friend. That's why he was under the burning house. That's why he ran to the only apartment on the top floor. He found Lizzie's parents, and his friends, dead. They had suffocated in the fire. But he saved their daughter.
He stole her from them.
He stole her from death.
We try to live as if death doesn't exist. Sometimes we remember and we know it can happen. Of course it can. But it happens to others, doesn't it? It's not us. There's always the next minute, the next hour, the next week.
Several of my childhood friends died thinking they had forever ahead of them. They left their wives and children behind. Some of them left abruptly. Some knew the end was inevitable.
Even before we started making the game I had a very vivid thought. A thought I wanted to convey without saying directly. A thought that is still important to me.
We hardly see the pain that surrounds us. Sometimes we know almost nothing about the people who live ONLY for us. We have no idea what they did for the sake of seeing us smile. And they'll be gone. Just like everyone else. Just like you and me.
The whole game was about one thing.
LITERALLY ONE THING.
I wanted you to call someone close to you and tell them you love them.
