Self Portrait (Interior)

Experimental works of art are great ways for people to push the limits of their fields, and the concept also works in various other cases, such as engineering or even video games. Introducing new concepts and ideas allows people to draw inspiration from your work and refine these ideas into something more enjoyable. On the other hand, it’s always difficult to express new concepts in a meaningful way.

Self Portrait (Interior) is an experimental exploration game in which you get to go inside a human body and walk around a pretty icky environment while trying to solve basic puzzles. The experience is designed with virtual reality in mind, so it should technically have a greater impact on you if you happen to have a Vive or an Oculus Rift headset lying around.

To begin with, the adventure starts at the entrance to the man’s mouth, who is actually designed to look like the game’s creator. Although you are supposed to go in through the mouth and descend into the stomach, there’s a loading screen when you reach the throat and you immediately find yourself in the stomach, which is a bit of a letdown, but understandable.

There’s not much to do once you are here, other than to look around and collect the occasional object. Since you do not have a story to follow or clear objectives to keep you engaged, it’s possible that boredom makes its presence known after a few minutes. On the other hand, the game is more about expressing an idea, and it would be nice to see more such projects in the future.

Lastly, the graphics are fairly nice, especially if you also happen to have a virtual headset to use with the game. The sense of scale is a bit skewed, on the other hand, because it feels like you are of normal size and the body itself is oversized, which is probably not the desired effect. On top of that, the level design is a bit dull and repetitive, mainly because there are not many places to visit.

In spite of the fact that there’s not much to do in Self Portrait (Interior), there’s a lot of potential in the idea, especially if the developer adds some kind of story to the whole thing. Even so, it’s a wonderful experiment that can surely inspire other people to expand on the idea.