I was in the mood for flight, and this fit the bill. It’s equal parts disorienting and enthralling.

InnerSpace casts you as a sentient mechanical glider, reactivated and asked to explore the inexplicable curved space of the Inverse. This world, whose history is parceled out to you in the brief conversations with your Archaeologist friend, text descriptions for the relics you discover, and chats with the ineffable demigods who serve as “boss fights”, exists in a ruined state as the interiors of a number of connected spheres.

These relatively small globes have a high curvature, and the glider is able to easily reorient itself, so directions have little inherent meaning. Pinwheeling around these enclosed spaces with no sky is the constant challenge. You navigate by landmarks, or else speed off and drift around to get another vantage.

Navigating your plane feels great, happily. As you progress you also find more glider designs or other upgrades to improve manoeuvrability, which enhances the smooth, free feeling of soaring through these ancient buildings or tunnelled landscapes. Most maps also have areas of water, so a lot of the game is also spent in dive mode which controls similarly, but involves (not always) elegant swandives from one medium to the other.

It’s not a flight simulator though. You always have a goal, sometimes to reactivate decrepit technology, or free living constructs of light. You do this usually by flying through certain targets, interacting through movement in a manner that reminded me of TGC’s Flower. Sometimes you push levers, smash through windows, or chase birds. One Shadow of the Colossus-esque “boss” has you fly around and through a gigantic swimming creature, clearing an alien fungus from its body.

I found InnerSpace to be fascinating and cool. I never quite got used to the feeling that I was almost always off-kilter, and liable to easily drift even further. I didn’t get motion sick but I can see how this might be provoked in a sensitive player. So even though the game is full of nice things like its starkly minimalist art and music, gameplay reminiscent of Flower and Jupiter & Mars, and a highly polished control scheme, this central theme to the navigation gave it a constant otherworldly feel. It’s both a pro and a con in a way, but it certainly makes the game memorable.