In-between

This game doesn't need a review. It can be played in fifteen minutes. Its actually faster to play it than reading the review. And It Its better worth. Game was created for Global Game Jam in just two days and its pretty polished in contrary to its origin.



Graphics
Let's begin with them as visual art is what is this game is about. They are simply outstanding. Aquarelle, or what the kind of colors was used, looks just great and makes game feel original. Backgrounds has some nice style to them and I really like them. Some of the sprites don't quite mash together as they seem to have different resolution and colors. There is great difference between beautiful sprites of doggy and girl in her ghostly state and enemies. Platforms are pretty mess as they don't fit the game at all. Sole battler and final artworks are magnificent and If they weren't so depressing, I would use them as wallpaper.
Overall, I really like the art and graphics and they definitely are the first amongst qualities of the game.

Music
The soundtrack is wholly custom too and it does fit perfectly in most cases. There is one song which seems to be bit out of pace, but it's nothing major and it could be uncomfortable just to me. Together with graphics, sound builds compact atmosphere around the mysterious story.

Story
Being dead works good for the frame of the game. It's nothing new as there were many stories about being dead but unable to rest for some reason. This one has some original twist to it and tho its not exactly my cup of caffeine, it suits the game's art direction well. I can feel drop of Lynch was added too.
Characters have no real space to be developed in between the start and the end. The protagonist is a girl and she has like no special traits except for being dead. On the other hand her dead dog is of bigger potential within the boundaries. Authors bet on making his speech mysterious to thrill the player and make him hurry to solve the mystery ahead. This motivation works fine by my opinion, the only problem is, there is not too much to do on the way.

Gameplay
Platforming is bar far the weakest part of the game. As I mentioned before platforms are ugly and non-fitting the art direction. It feels clunky to. I spent half of my play-through by falling off, back on the ground. There is that fake base for exploration too. Fake, because there is nothing to explore. There are these feathers which only can be grabbed in your physical form. And that is yet another feature. You can switch between physical and ghostly form. It's neat idea, yet not fully original again. The problem is it doesn't live up to its full potential. I loved the way colors and music changed with my form. Content didn't. You can speak with dead man in the underground only in your ghost form and get feathers with use of your physical body. What about need to switch between the modes to be able to access the end of the map or another creative switching tricks we can know from the likes such as Giana Sisters or Guacamole?
The sole battle uses vanilla system and its utterly boring. If I were creators, I would skip on it. The Antagonist should be defeated by her power of love or something not so violent.

Summary
This game is great for deep coffee break experience with some haunting art and cool simplistic story. What In Between managed really well is size, which is proper for its ambition and it ended up being very compact Global Game Jam entry.
I chose to give it three and half stars, but it's more up to personal preferences as someone can be totally untouched by both the story and the artistic style.