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Limbo Game Review

Limbo is a 2010 puzzle platform video game developed and published by Playdead for Microsoft Windows among other platforms. It is one of the best modern puzzle games.

This game was critically acclaimed upon its release and remembered as one of the best games of its respective year. In retrospect, it lost some of its impact in comparison to the stronger successor also released by Playdead – ‘Inside’. Still, this was the original one, so it deserves respect for everything that they did right from the get-go.

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The player guides an unnamed boy through dangerous environments and traps as he searches for his sister. The game is eerily similar to the aforementioned spiritual successor, but it’s scarcer in its world building for better and for worse. On the one hand, I did appreciate its incredibly dark, creepy atmosphere, but on the other hand, I wished that they populated the world with more characters. The first half has that scary spider and those alien glowing worms that parasitize you, but the second half of the game was too empty.

But the atmosphere is something else. The black-and-white visual presentation was simply breathtaking and I do contend that this game should not be denied the status of an art form. The minimalism was very unique while the lighting and shading made for such a moody tone that pleasantly reminded me of German Expressionist films from the twenties. The lack of a score was also fitting for this game that relied more so on sound to immerse you. Every single sound effect was extremely realistic here and this was to me the most captivating aspect of the game, one that made me riveted throughout.

Limbo also benefits from a fantastic story. Yes, it’s not as deep as the one in ‘Inside’, but it’s still very intriguing with an ending that is ambiguous and open for discussion. As the player finds his sister, he is transported to a sort of limbo state, which can mean that he is now officially dead or that he has been dead all along, the latter theory being the one I assign to myself.

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You can run left or right in two dimensions and you can also jump and climb. The game’s graphical presentation is excellent and I have no qualms with the overall gameplay mechanics, but I did have issues with its controls. The controls are very simple with just the action and jump button incorporated. That worked and made it very intuitive to play. However, the problem lied in the jumping that was rather uneven. Yes, the protagonist is a clumsy boy, but too often I would jump into death while at other times I would survive with the same jump that I did. It felt a bit too unpolished for me personally.

You can be killed by anything in Limbo and frankly too many things can kill you, but that meant that the game was trying to teach you what to avoid and where to focus your puzzle-solving energies better, so I was fine with it having numerous death traps. Those deaths were instantaneous and brutal in a very memorable fashion. The entire game is exceedingly dark and dreary in the best way possible. You can even use some objects such as parts of dismembered animals or those bear traps to aid you and of course you can push platforms to reach higher ground. All of these mechanics were so well realized, making for a rather fun, not too demanding first half.

But the second half is where the game suddenly became much more difficult, and too hard to be honest. The shift from those animals and bear traps to more mechanical puzzles made for a jarring change, but the mechanical puzzles were at least memorable and not too difficult. The gravity-focused puzzles where you had to change gravity at all times to get from one point to another were infuriatingly demanding and some of the solutions felt too random and specific, making them almost impossible to find out on your own. The vast majority of the game is perfectly fine and solvable individually, but the last couple of puzzles is where the creators weren’t paying attention to the difference between intelligent puzzles and puzzles that are just cheats.

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Limbo is more of a platformer than ‘Inside’ as some sections required precise jumping to make it to the end, so you really need to be both thinking hard and reacting quickly at all times. The game is very short at around five hours, but it’s not too short as this type of game is best experienced in smaller chunks of playthrough.