Video Game / In Between

What does up or down really mean? And what of life and death? Is one really the opposite of the other?

If you want a happy ending, that of course depends on where you stop your story. Orson Welles said that. It’s ridiculous.
Sometimes you live your life, sometimes not. Much of the time, you just end up hanging In Between.
This is the happy ending of a man who is dying.

— The Protagonist

Created in 2015, In Between is developed by the German indie developers Gentlymad, and follows the story of a nameless protagonist in the final days of terminal cancer, who embarks on a final gravity and reality-bending adventure within his mind, to help him come to terms with his impending doom, one stage of grief at a time.

---

This game provides examples of:

• Advancing Wall of Doom: The Denial levels center around this, with a looming wall of darkness that pursues you but retreats if it is stared at. This also happens in some of the Anger levels, where one of the deadly spheres slowly pursues you, and this is especially prominent in a section where you are trapped in a small room and must direct a crate onto a button before the sphere reaches you.
• Baldness Means Sickness: The character is bald during gameplay, but is shown with hair in some of the flashbacks. He specifically mentions going through chemotherapy at the start of the Depression chapter, explaining the hair loss.
• Blackout Basement: The Depression levels completely revolve around this trope – The level is completely dark, and requires you to light the way through it, as the darkness is instantly lethal.
• Book Ends: The game starts and ends at the protagonist’s deathbed, with him criticising Orson Welles’ statement on happy endings in both instances. However, his criticism is a more optimistic one, saying that there are no endings, happy or otherwise, and he is moving on to become something new.
• Checkpoint Starvation: In the original release, checkpoints were completely absent, which was a major complaint for many players. A major update two months later remedied this.
• Darkness Equals Death: Lethal darkness is present within both the Denial and Depression chapters, with the fearful darkness of the former consuming the Protagonist if it catches up to him, and the depressive gloom of the latter overwhelms him if he strays from the light.
• Death Is the Only Option: The final chapter, Acceptance, constantly loops until you purposefully touch the spikes in one of the rooms.
• Disappears into Light: In contrast to the violent shattering an in-game death causes, the Protagonist gently disassembles into shards of glass at the very end of the game, now that he is at peace with his demise.
• Dramatic Shattering: With a few exceptions, any death in the game causes the character and the level to shatter like glass, both in sound and appearance, before reforming into its original state.
  “Pain shatters reality into shards…”
• Dreaming of Times Gone By: Some levels feature cracks in the wallpaper, that tear open to reveal snapshots of the Protagonist's past (Referred to as MindImages by the game), giving further insight the events that led him to this point.
• Dying Dream: The entire story take place in one, and it is made overtly clear from the beginning narration from the bedridden, terminally-ill protagonist.
• Eternal Engine: The world in the Protagonist’s mind has an industrial aesthetic to it, with cogs, pistons and rivets visible in the foreground. Gears, industrial plating and smoke are visible in the background when the wallpaper is stripped away by deaths.
• Face Death with Dignity: Through the course of the game, the Protagonist comes to terms with his mortality, and opts to no longer run from or fight it.
  “In the end, it’s a question of dignity. How long do you continue grasping for the last straw? How desperate are you for another way out?”
• Feigning Healthiness: The Protagonist’s flashbacks show that he noticed some rather severe chest pains at the time of his wife’s pregnancy, but tried to ignore it for a long while and refused to tell her how much it hurt, insisting that the child comes first. It doesn’t work out well.
• Five Stages of Grief: The central theme of the game. The Protagonist has one last adventure of discovery through his mind, working through the five stages, named after the aspect he is encountering.
  • Denial: He begins to recall and relive his childhood fear of the dark, symbolised with encroaching walls of darkness that retract when stared at, but this eventually starts to shift into a generalised fear of the metaphorical darkness of his predicament, and culminates with him no longer being able to deny the reality of the situation.
  • Anger: He relives his Rage Breaking Point when he was fired from his job, symbolised with the throbbing, explosive anger pursuing him through the whole section. He is eventually able to push through when he reminisces about the birth of his child.
  • Bargaining: This is not touched upon as directly as the other five steps, but rather explores the importance of thinking of people other than himself, symbolised by having to control and collide a reversed-controls copy of himself.
  • Depression: The protagonist must work through the brutal nature of his chemotherapy and encroaching mortality, represented by a suffocating darkness he can only pass through with light. He eventually realises that it’s pointless to keep grasping for the final straw, which leads into…
  • Acceptance: The protagonist accepts that death is a part of life, symbolised by a constantly looping set of tiny rooms, and the only escape is a lone set of spikes upon the wall.
• Gravity Screw: The protagonist’s main ability, and the main focus of the game outside of the story. Any time you are standing on solid ground, you can switch the gravity to any of the four cardinal directions. This will affect several other objects, but some of them fall in the opposite direction to gravity, some will only fall in two directions, and some incorporate both of those qualities. There are also fields of green energy that inhibit the effect of the gravity’s pull on whatever enters it, forcing it to fall in a specific direction.
• Hitbox Dissonance: While most of the hazards in the game are lethal if they touch any part of the Protagonist, the darkness within the Depression levels only overwhelms him if they cover the center of his body.
• Hope Spot: A MindImage in the Bargaining chapter shows that the Protagonist’s cancer went into remission, letting them take a holiday and start making plans for the future again. It unfortunately returns.
• Long Song, Short Scene: The “School” song in the soundtrack is a four-minute long song, but only plays during the intermissions between the Denial and Anger chapters, and between the Anger and Bargaining chapters.
• Mental World: The game takes place within the Protagonist’s mind, as he is bedridden and near death within the physical world. Within it, he has to confront manifestations of the Five Stages of Grief, as well as his past memories, to find a way to work through his difficulties to come to terms with his fate.
• No Name Given: The main character is noticeably never given a name, despite many others having names, even those that are mentioned in a single line and then forgotten.
• Noodle Incident: We don’t see the full aftermath of the Protagonist’s “graceful exit” from his work when he was fired after his diagnosis, but given that his medical insurance only covered “most” of the bills, he potentially destroyed far more than the single computer monitor we witness in the Anger chapter’s introduction.
• Parental Issues: The protagonist’s relationship with his father has a lot of friction, and he very much holds it against him. The TV often won out over him in terms of attention, and he seems to have more time for his grandparents than him. He goes to his grave without knowing how much the Protagonist loathed him, but during his own declining health, he finally forgives his father.
• Rage Breaking Point: The Protagonist does not take it well when he is fired after his diagnosis.
• Satellite Love Interest: We learn very little about Linda other than the fact that the Protagonist married and had a child with her.
• The Topic of Cancer: Cancer is a very prominent theme throughout the game. It is what the protagonist is dying of, and he refers to multiple others throughout his life who have succumbed to it, such as his dog and a childhood acquaintance.
• Troubled Fetal Position: Unlike the standard shattering-glass deaths caused by most other things in the game, the darkness of the Depression levels overwhelms the Protagonist, who curls up into this position until the level resets.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: The checkpoint system behaves like a Save State, recording everything as it is and restoring it to exactly that state should you die, such as the position of hazards and if doors have been unlocked. While this can be very helpful, it is entirely possible to brick the puzzle if saved at the wrong time, such as saving when one of the Anger spheres or the Denial walls are close enough to render the rest of the puzzle impossible, forcing a reset.
• World of Symbolism: As discussed within the Five Stages of Grief, all the levels are manifestations of certain parts of that very theory.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: It’s not entirely clear how time within the Protagonist’s mental world interacts with the real world’s timeframe, as he states at the beginning of the game that he has a few weeks left to live, yet dies a mere few hours later, depending on the player’s skill at the game.
• Your Days Are Numbered: The protagonist is well aware of their impending doom, and while they initially attempt to deny it, they eventually accept that it’s coming.
  “They give me a few more weeks. Then that’s it.”
  “Who am I kidding? Time won’t reverse itself just because I want it to. The metastases are growing, and they’re going to kill me!”
• You Should Have Died Instead: The protagonist makes multiple spiteful comments about this when processing his rage, such as when he deviates from his happy memories of his graduation to lament why he had to die, rather than a couple from his class.

---