Limbo - review

When I was growing up in the eighties, UK TV's Channel 4 would frequently show, late at night, animation shorts produced from behind the Iron Curtain. Not exactly Mickey Mouse, they were often dark, grainy and disturbing. Maybe they were in some way a veiled critique of communism, or maybe that's what   forty years of communism does to you (though Stalin was a big fan of Disney, apparently). To a 13-year old awaiting a  'red triangle' programme, they were a nuisance but, looking back, the films were actually very good.

It was these shorts that were brought to my mind when I first played Limbo, a new  XBLA game. The visuals also reminded me of David Lynch's Eraserhead and of German expressionist silent cinema,  as Limbo is completely monochromatic  - a unique look for a videogame (well, since ZX81 days, anyway).

Limbo is a puzzle-platformer, like last year's media darling, Braid.  In the game, you play as a small boy, shown only in silhouette with two blinking dots for eyes (poignantly, these wink out when he dies).  The boy has to proceed from left to right in a scrolling expressionist landscape of dark forests, factories and towns, avoiding a variety of ways in which the landscape (and the odd giant spider) can dismember him.  And I  really do mean 'a variety of ways' - I was chopped to pieces by buzz-saws and fixed machine guns,  electrocuted, squashed by pile-drivers, fell from great heights, drowned, impaled by arrows (launched by other small boys), squashed by boulders and more.  Even though the boy is only shown in silhouette, these deaths are often graphically depicted (the 'gore' can be muted in the options screen).

This is probably the jolliest scene in the game

The objects and structures in the game behave rigidly to their own rules and it is by understanding these rules - reversing gravity for example - that the player can work their way through the spatial puzzles set by the developers.  As with Braid, the player gets a great sense of achievement in working out a puzzle that had previously seemed impenetrable, though I thought the difficulty level was significantly lower than with Braid (not that I wasn't stuck a few times).

There is a story attached to the game, that the boy is trying to rescue the soul of his sister, trapped in Limbo but this has very little connection to what you're actually playing. Back in the olden days when I started gaming, programmers would often, I have since read, make a game and then add the 'story' (essentially just for the text on the cassette insert) at the end - space empire, aliens, lost kingdom, curse, blah blah blah. Limbo's 'story' reminded me of that - it seemed to have very little intersect with what I was doing, other than in the name. I think, like the best art, players can bestow their own meaning on what they see in the game, rather than having the artist tell them explicitly what the work is about.

Yes, that is a dead body in the right-hand box

I wondered as I was playing, enraptured by the art style, would I have been so keen on it if it was a Wario game (instinctively, I feel it is more of a Wario game than a Mario one) and had more conventional visuals. Rather shallowly, I think I probably would not - the art style is so bound up with game, I think it would be a far lesser game if it had conventional 'videogame' graphics.  That probably says more about me than Limbo though.

Fantastic

I don't think I could write about Limbo without mentioning its price and length. The full game is 1200 MS points, which is in the top bracket of XBLA prices but it can be completed on the first play through  in only 4 hours (and far more quickly in successive play throughs, when the you know how to solve the puzzles). There is a trial game that you can download for free, so at least you can see if it is the type of thing that you'd like before paying the money over but, even if it is, the '£/gameplay hour' ratio is quite steep. 


Personally, I think it is worth it. After playing the trial and liking it, I rationalized that I'd pay a similar price for a blu-ray disc for a film with a shorter running time and not feel cheated and, if the game was of similar quality, the player should not feel cheated either.

Metropolis,  anyone?

I thoroughly enjoyed Limbo from start to  all-to-quick finish.  It might not be to everyone's taste - my wife said to me while playing it 'Are you still playing that horrible, depressing, game?' -  but if you want to play something totally different from anything else released this year, give Limbo a try.