Playdead, the brilliant Danish game studio behind Limbo, is teaming up with an unlikely partner to produce a new, pricey special edition of its excellent 2016 horror story Inside: the famous sex-doll makers at RealDoll. The video game-focused production company iam8bit, known for vinyl releases of game soundtracks and making lavish collector’s editions, will be selling the set for $375, making it one of the most expensive video game special editions ever (but still comfortably behind ridiculous publicity stunts like Grid 2’s “Mono Edition,” which included a street legal supercar, and Saints Row IV’s $1 million edition). For that price, you’ll get a copy of the game on a PlayStation 4 disc, a voucher with a download code for both Inside and Limbo on Steam, and some sort of surprise that iam8bit won’t reveal until the day these things ship in early 2019.
Now, if you’ve seen Inside’s infamous finale, which anyone considering buying this almost surely would have, the RealDoll connection makes sense once you get over the initial shock of a sex-doll company partnering with an arthouse game studio whose works are quietly violent meditations on life and death. There’s nothing sexy about Inside—unless you have a very specific fetish, we suppose—but its most lasting image is one that the fake-flesh artists at RealDoll should be able to replicate with perfectly disgusting accuracy. And if the surprise inside this $375 box isn’t a big, squishy replica of that thing, then someone seriously goofed up.
Preorders for the Inside special edition begin on March 8 at 7 a.m. PT. Iam8bit will be closing off orders forever on June 8, 2018 at 11:59 p.m. PT and estimates they’ll begin shipping early next year.