Limbo Review

I’ve been very disappointed with recent videogames using an excess of music, cut-scenes and an unnecessary focus on making a good story and not a good game. Rarely do I ever play or even hear about a game that doesn’t heavily indulge in these mostly superfluous ideas. But then Limbo came along and gave me a breath of air, if that air was ice cold and it was raining.


One of the most atmospheric moments in any game I've
ever played.  Seriously.

You awaken as a small boy who delicately stands and walks his way through an amazingly diverse set of situations. It’s very clear from the first millisecond that Limbo intends to create an experience of loneliness, isolation, oppression and even brutality, using the most simplistic art style and music you could ever think of. This minimalist effort works perfectly for placing you right into the setting. There’s no score or even much ambient music to separate you from the raw and visceral environment. Although you don’t necessarily feel like you’re the young boy himself, you still feel connected to him from an observer’s standpoint which heightens the feeling of isolation even more. A lack of dialogue and cinematics is an obvious yet incredibly effective choice that instantly conveys the emotion and atmosphere that each area of the world is dripping with. As you singlehandedly push a boat into murky water, jump across giant electrified sign letters, flip a switch that turns the world upside down and even simply walk somewhere in pitch blackness, you always feel small in a large and dangerous world.


This is pretty silly.



Limbo is focused solely on a physical experience. The only two obstacles in your way are dying and getting stuck in puzzles and the latter doesn’t become a problem at all until the last several areas when the atmosphere unfortunately dies down and Limbo becomes a mildly interesting plat-former. It’s still workable, but just not as eerie. The gameplay doesn’t repeat itself too often, and the new situations are almost instantly understandable because of the position of objects, subtle lighting and even gestures. There was a moment when I walked up to a large mosquito-like creature which quickly flew away from me and located itself around a broken, raised ladder. As it returned back to its original location I noticed that if I got closer to the animal it would raise its head as if listening to the sounds around it. I then understood that I had to approach it slowly and silently, allowing me to grab onto it and be flown up to the ladder. I then broke its leg off and it quivered away in pain. What did you expect?



Who designs a factory like this?!



Although it’s a beautifully atmospheric and effective videogame, Limbo is definitely not perfect. I became excruciatingly annoyed at later puzzles involving gravity switches, one of which took me about 30 minutes to do before using a walkthrough and finding out that I needed to get one measly box all the way off to the side of the area where I would never have looked. It also greatly suffers as the levels advance from a serene and moody forest into a bulky, huge and rather cartoonish factory. The sense of dread and isolation worked perfectly in the forest because you had come across vastly different scenarios. In the factory it’s just a series of lifeless block puzzles, buttons, gears and switches that attempt and obnoxiously fail at feeling oppressive and powerful. The fact they even included such a boring location in this game is disappointing and the transition from the forest to the factory area is too jarring to feel like you’re making any progress.



I couldn't find a picture of the ending so here's the boy
about to get crushed by a big rock...



Speaking of jarring; the ending. Now Limbo as a whole has virtually no context as to why you are actually doing anything. You wake up, go places and interact with things in the hopes of achieving other things. From an introductory stand point this works well as you are freshly interacting with the harsh environments but Limbo tries to shove this sappy and needlessly fragile ending involving a girl that keeps showing up around your trek. Granted, seeing the girl’s appearances in the distance, as in five meters away from you, was eye opening and beautiful every time but then we’re given this pathetically anti-climactic ending where the boy just slowly walks up to her and nothing happens. All we needed was one last step. I’m not asking for a huge finale but just one last action; a hug, a wave or anything. I actually was hoping the boy would kill her. That would have been a shockingly awesome twist because of how we thought of the boy up to this point. Demoralized and broken yet still retaining hope.



...why?



The boy himself interacts with the environments perfectly. Almost every jump you do feels like it’s just barely short enough to reach but never shorter than that. Even though the young character gives off the sense of weakness, mainly due to the fact that he wears shorts, the journey as a whole and the trials you overcome give him a surprising quality of strength, virtue, courage and even cold-heartedness, like when he’s running away from a giant spider creature that appears to have slaughtered an entire village of children. The music and tone of the game at that point seems to be making you more afraid of getting killed by the spider and less shocked by the fact that it just killed a bunch of people. Many of the puzzles suffer from being obnoxiously convenient for you to progress. Objects are placed so strategically that they diminish the idea of a harsh and broken environment. There’s even a situation when you get stuck to the floor and the spider, instead of simply stabbing you like every single other encounter you’ve had with it, wraps you up with web allowing you to wriggle out and escape seconds afterwards. It's still an effectively unnerving scene, but it's so inconsistent that you can tell that the developers just wanted to do something scary. It worked. Although the controls can get pretty finicky and cause more deaths than you intended, the checkpoints are placed perfectly so that you never get annoyed from dying and you can quickly learn how to deal with the obstacles you face.

Limbo is a downright fantastic videogame that accomplished everything it set out to achieve. It’s beautiful in practically every way. Apart from small nit-picky flaws like the disappointing locations in later areas, the rushed and useless ending and some vague, confusing puzzles, Limbo may as well be a perfect game. With excellent sound and visuals combined with very raw and visceral gameplay it is one of the most atmospheric experiences I’ve ever had.

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Made by Allison Jeffreys.