I’ve never been afraid of a game before. Afraid of something in the game, sure – I remember having lost the Resident Evil 2 N64 cartridge for about a month, having thrown it across the room after a particularly shocking Licker assault. But to be afraid of the actual game, what it could be about, what the game play will be like, what horrors await in the shadows… that’s new. Limbo is that kind of scary.

Rating: T for Teen
Genre: Puzzle
Number of Players: 1
Publisher: PlayDead
Release Date: July 21, 2010

BUY

The game follows the journey of a young boy, wandering along the edge of Hell looking for his sister. There is no dialog or voice acting, and the score is resigned to shadows, ideas of music. As you’d expect from Purgatory, all color has been drained from the landscape. What’s left is black, white, and varying shades of grey. The main character himself is nothing more than a silhouette-like boy with piercingly white eyes . While I can’t think of a single other time where a game’s protagonist and all other NPCs show no emotion (and really don’t have faces at all, to be straight about it), somehow they’re able to use this hollowness and contrast to twist the player into caring anyway. Seeing the little boy’s lifeless body being ground up by machines and saw blades, or drown in a lake already filled with tiny carcasses, elicits an intense motivation to solve a current puzzle so the two of you can leave that area immediately.

Run.

Considering all Limbo lacks, parts-wise (dialog, music, etc.), the game feels complete. You are running from the giant spiders because you will die if you don’t. You are rotating the room because it’s the only way you can get to the top. You’re finding a route that goes up because the level is filling with water and you’ll drown if you don’t hurry. It’s all so simple, childlike. Even the journey – a boy looking for his sister – is just unique and wonderful without being bogged down by excess. This simplicity leads to some of the best (and saddest, and scariest) moments of any game before it.  Limbo proves that games don’t need to be colorful and noisy to be interesting.

One of the things I most enjoyed about Limbo was the problem solving. Your character approaches an area where all the pieces of the puzzle you’re facing are laid out before you. The player can try the “run at the problem and figure it out as you go” approach, which ends with a lot of gruesome deaths and frustration, or they can take a second or two to really look at the puzzle. As the game wears on, a lot of the mechanics of certain puzzles become very complicated and lengthy, so the player is rewarded for examining the entire problem before plunging in head first. On the other hand, a couple of the puzzles are unnecessarily hard; too often was I stuck at a ridiculously difficult series of events, where the correct way through to the next area was just timing my jump better, down to fractions of a second. I can understand asking a lot of the player, but do not sacrifice playability for the expectation of the player’s cat-like reflexes. I’d hate to think someone would have to miss out on the Limbo experience because they couldn’t clear the endlessly frustrating electrified mineshaft level.

Don't drown.

As I said earlier, the game scares me. I live for the next big horror moment or event because it’s a rush, but this game is different. It’s hard to describe the feeling it leaves in me, but I keep coming back to “vacant”, “sad”, and “dark”. Early comparisons to 2008’s Xbox Live masterpiece Braid were thrown about, which I can understand, though the experience in action is an altogether different monster. The atmosphere created in the world of Limbo is unsettling and amazing – it’s a gameplay experience unlike any I’ve had before, and I would absolutely recommend it. Play it at night by yourself at first to get the full effect of what the developers are trying to make you feel, but just remember that there’s no shame in waiting until morning and coaxing a friend into being there for support.