LIMBO Review

nota bene: starting with this review, I will cease giving games numerical scores in reviews. Games are too subjective and complex to summarize your feelings about them in a simple number

Playing LIMBO is like being seated next to a pungent vagrant growling profanities to himself on a bus. It’s a weird game, not the charming and amusing kind of weird, but a starkly homicidal and disturbing kind of weird that is nonetheless entrancing, beautiful and utterly terrifying. This game is a freaky kind of genius unlike anything seen before in gaming.

Gameplay

Much like Portal and Braid, LIMBO is a puzzle platformer that derives its greatest appeal from its challenging, but non-frustrating puzzles ultimately giving the player an immense sense of satisfaction upon completion. Much like the prior games, LIMBO tries to make the player feel smart and accomplished upon overcoming its many puzzles.

Where LIMBO differs from its predecessors is how it conducts its puzzles. While Portal and Braid encouraged the player to fully explore and exploit all the possible ramifications of a central game mechanic (respectively three-dimensional movement and four-dimensional gameplay), LIMBO’s puzzles are of the environmental family. Much like those found in Zelda, LIMBO asks the player to use naturally occurring laws of physics to explore and experiment all possible approaches to a given problem. This gives the game a “positive trial-and-error” aesthetic, prompting players to use their creativity to think of potential solutions to puzzles.

If the above paragraph sounds vague, its because it is. LIMBO does not rely upon one central mechanic to carry the player through its brief six hours. Each puzzle is unique and introduces a new gameplay mechanic and is never seen again. This effectively prevents the game from ever growing stale and keeps the game interesting beyond the initial few hours. All I can say is that the puzzles often involve the use of jumping and a “USE” key, which lets the player interact with the world in interesting ways like pressing switches, reversing gravity, moving boxes and grabbing onto objects.

That said, LIMBO’s gameplay isn’t perfect. Some weak jumping controls mar what is otherwise unique and unparalleled gameplay.

Story/Aesthetics

As a ludic art-game, LIMBO intentionally leaves its story ambiguous and vague. Not one word is uttered throughout the entirety of the game’s campaign and the story is told without cutscenes or loading screens or even sound: the entirety of LIMBO takes place in a single, vast level. Thus, the game fully embraces the perks of its unique medium and tells its story through its gameplay and interactivity.

And what a strange story that is. Without traditional narrative tubes like words or sounds, LIMBO manages to speak more about death, causality and the fabric of existence than most traditional media. In search of his missing sister, a boy enters Limbo and wakes up in a mysterious forest, the air soaked with hostility. Throughout the player’s journey through LIMBO, the player journeys through saddening environments wherein everything exists to kill the player. It’s a terrifying game to play through, but an utterly absorbing one. Despite the world’s overwhelming hostility, LIMBO’s vision of a monochromatic hell is cold, stark and lonely.

Conclusion

LIMBO will by no means be the best game you ever played in your life, but it will certainly be one of the most memorable. Unique and indescribable gameplay stays fresh and interesting through an absorbing six hours and the game’s unique method of storytelling is ambiguous as its gameplay. Despite its horrific and disturbing weirdness, LIMBO transcends these strange design choices to become dynamic, fresh, energetic and unlike anything ever attempted before in gaming. Recommended.