Review | Limbo

How often is it that a game which makes you sad a good thing? Limbo, an indie development has hit Xbox Live Arcade as part of the winter madness round up and brings along with it a breath of fresh air, a sense of melancholy and at its heart a damn fine game.

The first thing that strikes you in Limbo are the fantastic graphics, with the entire game playing out in shadowy shades of grey, black and white. You’re cast into a world of rotted out forests, tumble down cities and decaying factories. The whole environment is one where everything is putrefying, a cycle which shows no sign of ending, and I suspect never will.

The object of Limbo is not to save the world, defeat an evil enemy or even to escape. While the game’s website makes mention of our ‘hero’ seeking the fate of his sister, the reality is that this game makes no attempt to give you a plot or story at all. The rare genius of this design is it has allowed you as the player to create your own story in your head – in my case simply one of survival in a world turned increasingly moribund and deadly.

Your character certainly is no action star. In fact you’re given one of the most vulnerable roles possible, that of a small child. You have no weapons, no powers, just the simple ability to make a small jump and manipulate objects. You have no identifying features apart from your glowing white eyes, and you certainly don’t know how it is you came to be in this bleak landscape.

You will come across foes which range from giant spiders to evil children, who in the style of Lord of Flies have turned tribal and vicious – assaulting you with primitive blowguns or laying out deadly traps. You will die  a lot. One of the achievements is to play through the entire game and die 5 or fewer times; initially I scoffed but have since come to realise the near impossibility of performing this feat. But death in Limbo is not something to despair over, simply part of the game. With many of the dangers of the game hidden from site the pay off is in identifying these and then finding a way past them.

And dark puzzles there are a plenty. You’ll use the bodies of dead children to cross open water, carefully timed jumps to avoid massive pendulums, pass through concrete blocks raised by pulleys and flee from some terrifyingly massive foes.

Ragdoll physics are put to an amazing use. The animation is as smooth as it gets, and the deaths (there are many ways this will happen) seem all the more gory for the lack of detail and color you have on screen.

You will love this game and you will hate it. One thing’s for sure if you have an Xbox and a love of platformers then you would be doing yourself a disservice by not playing it. Limbo needs to be shown to the infamous Roger Ebert next time he denies games can ever be art.    [9]