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The Bit Where I Talk About Essentially Review Limbo

The other day, I finally got round to completing Limbo; a 2-D platforming/puzzle game in which the protagonist, a young boy, ventures through a land of misty forests, decrepit rooftops and foreboding industrial areas - in order, apparently, to find his sister. The game's graphics are black-and-white and heavily stylized. To begin with, I thought this was a bit pretentious; but as I played, I began to see that it was a sensible direction. It's pretty unobtrusive, and manages to convey a lot with (relatively) few assets.

One of the cosier areas of the game

Gameplay wise, Limbo is a lot more Abe's Oddyssey than Super Mario Bros/Land. The game's challenges consist of physics puzzles and platforming, with the latter based more on timing than coordination, which is fortunate, as the character is anything but agile, and the controls often feel sluggish. The puzzles, meanwhile, are extremely varied, with several earlier levels requiring you to move loose objects around in order to bypass bear traps or get enough height to jump over (and occasionally ride) rolling boulders. Later areas have you playing with magnets, gravity and water levels to realign the environment in order to pass, sometimes literally - one section requires you to rotate the entire level to progress; wall-mounted circular saws, previously part of the scenery, lurch around toward you as you ride the landscape, requiring some rather accurate jumping to avoid them. Just thinking about it is making me imagine that this page is slowly slanting to the left.

<Hilarious joke about Australia> (source: Wikipedia)

A lot has been said about the game's atmosphere, and it's not difficult to see why. Things are often macabre. You'll sometimes see corpses hanged, caged or just slumped on the ground, and occasionally you'll need to use them as part of a puzzle in order to progress. I'd even suggest that the game has elements of black humour in it, if I was willing to pretend I knew what that meant.

With all that said, I was irritated by the game's lack of story. I realise that it's supposed to be minimalistic (I'm surprised I've only used this word once in this entry) and open-ended, but the result, to me, was a plot so skeletal that I found it difficult to care. I don't mean it has the subtle fill-in-the-gaps environmental storytelling of early Tomb Raider games (or to a lesser extent, Half-Life and Metroid Prime), but that there's very little story to actually tell.

A game which promises so much with its atmosphere should deliver something story wise, too. With that in mind, if I discover more about it on a subsequent playthrough, I'll amend this article and post a picture of me slapping myself.

In summary, the game is good. This isn't a review and so I'm not going to give it a score, but if it was, I'd probably give it 8/10.


Music and Other Thoughts

The other day, I went back to download the rest of the Humble Indie Bundle 4 games, and noticed that the soundtrack for each title was included at no extra cost. I wish more games/distributors did this. There's probably business logic somewhere in there - if a game soundtrack is good, I'll listen to it outside of the game, and if I do that, I'll think about the game more, and if I do that, I'll be more likely to recommend the game to my friends. I think this would have been a good tactic for Dear Esther, whose excellent soundtrack costs £5.99 (as an MP3 download on Amazon), which is a mere pound less than the game itself.

Above: not the Dear Esther soundtrack

The playthrough of Ragnarok is (probably) on its way, but as an obscure game in a rather unsexy genre, it's proving a quite tricky subject for any kind of remotely engaging writing. I don't want to bore my 0 readers.

That's all for now. Back I go to trying to unlock The Kid on Super Meat Boy.