Limbo (2010)

So, this one, I loved the art, and the feel of it. Super dark. The traps and "puzzles" were really something, tbh I died so many times in one of the traps I had to ask a friend to help me pass it (shame).

The ending was nice, hard at first to understand what I needed to do tbh, the last "puzzle" was crazy for me. I died too much.

Still a fun game.

Limbo is the perfect example of a game that can be a work of art at the same time. A visually astonishing masterpiece that operates so profoundly with lighting and darkness. A 2D Platformer hidden inside a miniature ecosystem, where everyone and everything tries to murder you as brutally as possible. You will die time and again, only to get a step closer to solving the current puzzle the world has to offer. And there will be lots of puzzles.

You must think outside the box (or about moving the box somewhere else), because some puzzles won't wait for you to do the first move. Dangers lurk behind you, from vicious creatures straight from hell (ok, they are just regular spiders, but scary af.), to the inhabitants of this land who try to sabotage you, to the machinery built to destroy you, like saw-blades and machine turrets. You have to use the scenery to your advantage, learning to manipulate the environment your way.

As complicated as it might sound, as simple are the mechanics of this game. You move with the arrows and use things with Ctrl. It is the perfect game to play on a weaker laptop too, even without a mouse, since you won't need it. But simple doesn't mean easy. Timing must be impeccable at some puzzles, others are leaving you scratching your head for several minutes, thinking about the solution. I once turned to the dark side and peeked at Youtube for a solution for a puzzle around the middle of the game, but soon realised that I should have spent maybe some more time thinking about that unorthodox solution and promised never to do that again. Believe me, even at the harder puzzles near the end, it is worth finding out the solution on your own. You won't have to wait that long anyways, since the journey can be finished during an afternoon. It's a short game, but a meaningful one.

The story is mostly left to your fantasies, since the game won't tell you anything, yet you feel like it has a weight. You know there is a reason for this journey and you feel the emotions. Just like with any other piece of art, there is no need for explanation, because you have to feel it to appreciate it.

P.S.: There are some collectibles too, if you are into that stuff, but you must explore every inch of the world to find them all. I only got 3/11, but finding those felt great, I have no idea where the others could have hidden :)

Limbo was one of the first indie games that really made it big, next to Castle Crashers, and for that it earns its spot to be remembered, whether fondly or not, among gaming history. I remember seeing the trailer for it before it released and being immediately drawn to its stark visuals and its monochrome color palate, because it just looked so vastly visually different from everything else at the time. In an era of grey and brown FPS's and lush open world sandbox titles, Limbo took it to the extreme and removed all color whatsoever which made it very unusual and hard to ignore. Plus, being a platforming lass myself, I couldn't help but feel very excited for it.

And while it is a fairly standard platforming pseudo puzzle game, there's something infinitely eerie and endlessly complex about it, isn't there? It managed to creep its way into your thoughts and stay there for years, didn't it? It obviously did for a lot of people too, when you stop and considering how many games you still see to this day that pop up with a rather similar style or aesthetic. Hell, even stuff that is seemingly totally unrelated in every possible way - stuff like Dark Maus for a perfect example - are so very obviously influenced by its visual aesthetic. And I'm not here to pile onto the already overwhelming amounts of theoretical debate articles that have been written since its initial release to try and make sense of it all, more than anything because I don't think you can, but I am going to try and explain why its tonal bearings left such an imprint of my mind, personally.

Whatever kind of story Limbo is trying to tell, whatever kind of plot it's attempting to convey, doesn't matter. What matters is how it feels. You're a child, looking for (presumably) your sister, and you're lost. You don't know where you are, don't understand what's around you, can't comprehend why everyone is trying to hurt you and everything is black and white. This, to me, was childhood is essence, whether you're in an actual limbo or not. So much of childhood, whether you grew up in an abusive situation like I did, or you had a perfectly normal relatively happy adolescence, was all about being confused and feeling alone and never really being sure what exactly was going on around you. Adults were often either overbearing, uninterested or actively working to hurt you. The only other people worth seeking out, for most kids, were other kids. I mean, not for me, cause other kids hated me as much as adults did, but still. And everything had a black and white substance to it; good or bad, right or wrong, dead or alive.

Limbo IS childhood.

And it nails it, honestly. Nothing else has ever so perfectly visually personified childhood in a medium where you actively partake in it. Hell, one of the most memorable things from the game that chases you and tries to capture you is a giant spider, and who's more afraid of spiders than children? I mean, I wasn't, cause I was a weird ass little girl, but you know what I'm trying to say. Limbo is also childhood because you're stuck from being able to move forward until everyone agrees it's okay, once you hit an arbitrary age, then you're considered an adult, even with all the ridiculous hypocritical laws that state otherwise. Can't drink at 21, but you can join the army and die for a country that doesn't care about you at 18. Childhood, adolescence in general, is Limbo. A seemingly eternal struggle to feel anything hopeful, to reach a point of betterment, to attain a level of understanding of the world and to see things in any other color besides black and white.

And to stop. running. away.

But for some people, that never ends. Some people, like myself, are forever stuck in a somewhat black and white world, constantly searching for companionship, forever running from things that will stop at nothing to hurt us. Some people never escape from Limbo, and if anything, only descend further into it without being completely swallowed by Hell itself. I may be Jewish, but I take my metaphors very seriously. I think that's why LIMBO resonated so deeply within me, because it really captured that surreal almost eerily ethereal otherworldy vibe that encompassed childhood. Where you eternally felt forgotten, where reality itself felt questionable at best, and where, if you looked just hard enough, you could spot the seams of the world coming undone, frayed at the edges of a distorted perception of a world run by people who don't know what they're doing, and in the process, terrifying the children around them as a result.

Limbo is a platformer with slight puzzle elements, yes, but it's also because that's what childhood is. Constantly running, trying to reach a destination, a new horizon, always puzzling over things that don't quite make sense yet.

Or perhaps I just look far too much into things.

First, I paid $1.49 for this game during a Steam sale. Since this is a short game, I probably wouldn't pay more than $5 for it, so pick it up on sale, unless you just can't wait.

Second, if you can't get a controller working with this game within 30 minutes, give up trying (skip this whole paragraph if you don't care about controllers). I spent WAY too much time trying to get a few different game controllers working with this game and I just couldn't get them to work. It was frustrating and I wish I hadn't tried so hard because the game has minimal controls which work just fine on keyboard. I was trying to connect a usb SNES controller and a Switch Pro Controller to my MacBook Pro, running the game on Steam. The controllers would navigate the Steam menus just fine but didn't work at all in the game itself.

Now onto the game itself: The game started pretty slow, and I wondered if I was going to like it. When I checked the "Load Chapter" screen, I noticed I got through about half the chapters super quickly and easily. After the first half, the chapters do get much more challenging and creative, and this is where the real fun begins! Each chapter is basically a single puzzle and there are 39 of them.

If you don't know what this game is, I'd describe it as a creepy puzzle platformer. You will die and/or try many things sometimes before figuring out a puzzle to progress. Dying isn't a problem since you respawn very close to where you died.

Overall, I liked the aesthetic of the game; the monochromatic art style was actually pretty cool and very fitting. There is a hidden area which really puts your skills to the test and I recommend trying it. I really enjoyed the challenge and it's really not as bad as some people were saying when I was reading about it. For one, the hidden area is broken into sections with respawn points, so if you die you don't have to start all the way over. Not all versions include the hidden area, from what I read.

I wish the game had been longer and had more puzzles, but at least the game didn't outstay its welcome.

LIMBO gives you something familiar - and something quite different - in problem solving and "platforming".

I cannot quite express how much I loved the style and atmosphere of LIMBO; the black and white colors, the haunting sound world, and a very simple yet inventive world is something quite different.

In LIMBO, you don't gather lives or trophies. You simply aim to survive through yet another obstacle. Should you die in a rather horrific, gruesome way (and you most certainly will), you will be transported back to the beginning of that problem, and have to take another go at it. The save points come frequently, which you will learn to appreciate very soon after the beginning.

You learn as you go, using past mistakes and discoveries to get yourself across another obstacle. However, at least in my case, I sometimes had to refer to guidance of others in order to move forward, because honestly, I was stuck. That is the beauty and ugliness of this game; you bash your head into a wall, hoping it would give, the right way to get ahead avoiding you until you're ready to scream in frustration.

A brilliant game that even with a little outside help should give you hours of breathtaking game-time.

I really enjoyed the first hour or so of Limbo; the graphics are appealing, the atmosphere is great, the puzzles and platforming are fun but slowly it started to get dull. Nothing changes: the platforming stays basically the same throughout the game; every time a new element is added to the puzzles it is repeated a dozen times; and, since every part of the game looks identical, the atmosphere and graphics become less and less impressive. After the second hour I was tired of it and I probably wouldn't have continued if I hadn't know it was so short. By the end I had to force myself to play.

It is odd to say that a three hour game overstayed its welcome but it really did, I would have given this a higher score if it had only been an hour long. I would still recommend trying this at least for the first hour but I won't be playing the latest game from the developer.

So I fucked up. Instead of redeeming a year of Xbox Gold with my Microsoft Rewards points, I went and redeemed Xbox Game Pass. I don't want Xbox Game Pass, let alone a whole year of Xbox Game Pass. Not how I roll. I want Xbox Gold, damnit. Those points take much too long to accumulate for me to blow them on something I don't want.

I'm still bitter about it. But if there is anything redemptive about it, it's taking a dreary Sunday without any great NFL games to play through Limbo.

Limbo is a light platformer. I say "light" because I suck at the whole (waves hands ambiguously) platforming genre, so any game that feels like a platformer that I can actually play is light as hell. The Cave, for example, is a light platformer. It's more about the puzzles and story than jumping on platforms. Oh, you jump. Sometimes you even have to TIME your jump. But... it's different.

Limbo is puzzles and experience and a whole library of gory death. So much death.

Helping Limbo is a ridiculously fair checkpoint system. Yes, you will die a lot. You will mistime a jump or fail to flip the right switch or neglect to see a spikey spike in your path. You will see the blood spurt, your character's head decapitate, flesh become pulp. But you won't get set back any further than your current location, usually just a few steps before your untimely demise.

The puzzles are fun, sometimes require a bit of thought, but never feesl unfair. Oh, I had to consult a walkthrough semi-regularly after the midway point in the game. Fair doesn't mean I'm capable of solving them. But there's a difference between being unable to solve, and the game just nastily hiding solutions behind gonzo logic. Limbo is entirely fair.

It's a relatively quick game. My Xbox account says it took me 8+ hours, but that's wrong. I was flipping between my Xbox and football on TV. Taking breaks to do tasks around the house or have a cig. I reckon a non-speed run would take most people 4 hours or so? Just at a guess.

Anyway, if anything flat and puzzly is up your ally, Limbo is a fine use of time.