Vital Stats

Genre: Puzzle/Platformer
Players: 1
Online: Leaderboards

Developer: Playdead
Publisher: Playdead
ESRB Rating: T
Release Date: 7/21/09

Platforms

• XBLA

Although it’s a 2D platformer, LIMBO is a horror game, so come prepared. Whether you’re fleeing a giant spider or succumbing to brain worms, the game is stark and disturbing. That makes it incredibly compelling. Add that to the black and white silhouette art, vivid animation, and precision platforming, and you have a great game. It’s just not for the faint of heart.

Somewhere In Between
Horror is all-too-often incompatible with games. Zombies don’t frighten space marines, and survival horror is more scarcity than scary. However, LIMBO doesn’t just nail it, it extends horror’s scope to the platforming genre. You take the role of a young boy who wants to check up on his sister in LIMBO. What follows is his journey through that hostile twilight.

Horror is fundamentally about feeling vulnerable, and LIMBO imparts that by making you fragile. Even the game’s tutorial section is lethal to your young charge, so you have to learn-by-dying. This makes LIMBO a game of sight-reading puzzles: whenever you see something–anything–you first imagine how it will kill you, then work out how to survive it, and then cross your fingers.

The LIMBO play loop:
1) How will it kill me?
2) Is it already underway?
3) OH SHI–

The game’s puzzles are so dangerous because they’re incredibly diverse. LIMBO will drop a pylon on your head when you step on a switch and then make the very next switch the safe place to stand. You have to think on your feet to charge through some threats and flee others. Traps will herd you into other traps, and some deaths lie in ambush while others will barrel right at you. So the only way to succeed at LIMBO is to engage with it, and that makes remarkably compelling gameplay.

In a strictly abstract sense, this makes LIMBO plays like an oldschool platformer. The game reduces the requisite frustration with frequent and calculated checkpoints, but it’s no easier for it. In fact, Limbo has the puzzle-platforming problem where you can’t tell if failure comes from your head or your hands. That is, the exacting platforming can make it hard to tell if your last death came from a bad plan or poor execution. So you can get stuck beating your head against a problem until either it gives or you do. Either way, it completely derails the pacing and wrecks the immersion.

However, the seams in the pacing stand out because the rest of the game is so smooth. LIMBO may be a challenging platformer, but it feels perfectly fair once you’ve learned suspicion. The controls are precise, responsive, and dead simple. It is simply elegant.

Veni Vidi Mori
LIMBO‘s silhouette-only world really highlights that elegance, because it doesn’t waste any words while storytelling. There are countless tiny unsettling things, and you’ll discover each one by seeing it. You’ll pass through shades of the real world, but everything is twisted and violent. Tribal children stalk the tree houses and the factories primarily export machine guns and giant saw blades. The light that filters down is pale and cold, and the shadows swallow everything else. There’s no color anywhere.

What’s black and white and red all over?

The game’s soundscape is also unsettling. LIMBO doesn’t have a soundtrack in the multiple-songs sense of the word, and opts instead for ambient sound. There’s a throbbing hum of insects and machines everywhere in the world that gives the impression of movement just offscreen (usually because there is). The sound blends in and out of sustained tones that smooth the transitions. Pipe that sound through headphones and it’ll isolate you from the world.

The animation is also impressive. The boy does little things that anticipate his next move, like reaching out to catch a cliff or bracing a jump as he slides. Inanimate objects behave like physics bodies, too. So when the boy reaches out to brace a falling crate, LIMBO feels much more tangible than the average game.

All the little animations add up to make the boy feel more alive than the usual platform hero, and so it hurts a little more when he dies. It all ties back to making you feel vulnerable. You’ll remember the first bear trap that closes around your neck. In the same way, you’ll never really get comfortable with the way your body sways after your face is impaled. Even the game’s constant checkpoints can’t take the sting from death; you’ll feel terrible every time it happens. LIMBO is never ostentatious about death, but it is frank and the game profits from it.

Judgment
LIMBO will shake your confidence. Whether it’s switching up puzzles, redlining the difficulty, or isolating you in sound, every part of the game collaborates to make you feel the horror. The game is a bit brief (5-10 hours), but there’s so much inside that it’s no flaw. Casual gamers may be put off by the game’s difficulty, but it has a shallow learning curve and (ahem) unambiguous feedback. The jaded hardcore will enjoy feeling imperiled for a change, and everyone can love the game’s killer style. This one is not to be skipped.

What It Costs: $15

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $20 (buy)
•To The Genre Fan: $20 (buy)
•To The Casual: $10 (demo)