Innards

You spend your first hour in Innards mostly lost, which is by design — the hyperbolic corridors fold back on themselves in ways no flat map can represent, and Dex, the low-life functionary you’re controlling, is just as unsure of the geometry as you are.

Dex and His Reasons for Descending Into the Withinternets

Dex works small jobs for a crime syndicate and would rather do the bare minimum to afford rent and stay home with his Personal Computer than go looking for trouble. Innards forces his hand anyway, sending him deeper into the decomposed remains of the Withinternets after rumors of a spreading cult threaten his employer’s income.

The Withinternets themselves are framed as a long-abandoned digital afterlife that rotted into strange self-assembling creatures called Junkbags, which vary wildly in size, ambition, and temperament. Some are dangerous, some are just background noise cluttering the hyperbolic streets Dex has to cut through.

The cult tracking back to a figure called Mother Carrion gives the plot its throughline, but the writing never rushes to explain the cosmology fully, which is either intriguing or frustrating depending on how much lore-hunting a given player enjoys.

Fighting With the Cursword Instead of a Sword

Combat in Innards runs on a weapon the game calls the cursword, essentially a mouse-pointer blade Dex slashes with rather than a conventional melee weapon, which fits the game’s framing of violence as just another bodily function of a rotting digital world. Learning to read enemy attacks through hyperbolic space, where distances and angles behave unlike anything in a normal 3D game, takes noticeably longer than picking up a typical action title’s combat loop.

Community feedback has flagged specific combo issues, including a crash tied to using the hourglass pointer toss and the blade in close succession, which is the kind of rough edge you expect from a solo-developed, custom-built engine still labeled as an alpha.

Clearing Rafflesias Across the Hyperbolic Map

1. Treat every rafflesia encounter as its own self-contained mini dungeon crawl rather than a quick side objective.
2. Expect enemy health pools to feel unusually high at first, since the pacing rewards herding groups of Junkbags rather than trading hits one at a time.
3. Use the branching, tightly curved paths deliberately, since the hyperbolic layout means a route that looked like a dead end can loop back somewhere useful.

Destroying a rafflesia doesn’t come with an obvious payoff explained on-screen, which players openly debate in community spaces — some find that ambiguity part of the game’s charm, others want clearer feedback on what all that effort is actually building toward.

Why Newcomers Struggle With the Hyperbolic Camera

Players coming in expecting a conventional Metroidvania layout tend to fight the camera and the geometry for the first stretch of play, since paths that look like they should intersect in Euclidean space simply don’t here. Once the disorientation eases, the branching network of Junkbag territory starts to read more like an actual living settlement than a maze.

One touch that only registers once you’ve played for a while is passing through the area near Uma and noticing how the pre-rendered, clay-like art style changes texture slightly depending on which direction you approach from, a side effect of the underlying hyperbolic rendering rather than a scripted event.

Is Innards difficult for players unfamiliar with non-Euclidean geometry?

Yes, at least initially — the hyperbolic layout is the single biggest adjustment, and most of the early frustration players report comes from misjudging distance and angle rather than from the combat itself.

What does destroying a rafflesia actually accomplish?

The game doesn’t spell this out directly, which is a point of ongoing debate among players; some rafflesia clears open new paths through Junkbag territory, while the broader narrative payoff tied to Mother Carrion’s cult remains intentionally vague this early in development.

Does the cursword have different attack types?

Yes — Dex can combine the cursword with tools like the hourglass pointer toss, though certain combinations are still unstable in the current alpha build and can cause the game to crash.

Innards isn’t interested in making its hyperbolic geometry easy to love, and Dex’s slow crawl toward whatever Mother Carrion’s cult is actually building in the Withinternets stays deliberately half-explained even after you’ve cleared your first rafflesia.