Limbo

When this critically-acclaimed indie title hit a sale on Steam a while back for only $3 I knew I had to grab it.  Unfortunately it got pushed farther and farther into the backlog until yesterday when I finally decided to break it out and see what all the fuss was about.

Limbo is a hard game to describe.  There is no real coherent plot, no overarching objective besides "survive", no concrete characters to identify with, nothing.  All you're given is the silhouette of a boy, who wakes up in this shadowy forest, with the only way to go being forward.  You run into all sorts of life-threatening situations with bear traps, giant spiders, brain-burrowing worms, and at times even other silhouettes that seem bent on your destruction.

In essence Limbo is a puzzle-platformer, with various strange situations put in front of you where you need to use your wits and good timing of the jump button to move on.  The puzzles themselves are ruthlessly inventive, requiring heavy brain use to overcome them.  The solutions are often staring you in the face, but as with every great platformer, it doesn't make you feel stupid when you finally figure out what you were doing wrong.

As with any work of art, the game itself is open to interpretation, especially with the rather abrupt ending (which I will not spoil).  Many critics praise it for its humanity and insight, while frankly, I think they're just seeing what they want to see.  The game is left so completely devoid of information, and left so completely up to interpretation, that honestly you can say whatever you want about the meaning of the game and probably be right.  While normally I would find fault with this and call it pure pretension, the game itself is wonderful enough that I don't really care.  The sound design, environments, and gameplay all create this rich immersive experience that is at once impossible to understand and yet completely understandable.  I ran through it in only 3 hours, without trying to find or pick up all the hidden gems throughout, but I would easily call it 3 hours well spent.

Overall, Limbo is a very interesting experience that stands on its own both as a solid platformer, and as a work of art.

Limbo gets an 8/10.