[PC] Limbo Review

[DoctorFinger]

Limbo Review

Title - Limbo
Platform - PC (also on XBLA & PSN)
Developer - Playdead
Publisher - Playdead
ESRB Rating - T (Teen)
MSRP - $9.99
Editor - Michael "DoctorFinger" Chauvet

What's Hot: Hauntingly beautiful visual style. Some really great, challenging puzzles.

What's Not: It’s short. Real short. A few annoying, but not game-breaking, bugs

Limbo is one of those games which is really tough to review. It’s really short - I beat it in about 3 hours, and that’s being generous - but very engrossing.

Do not adjust the color on your set, that's as chromatic as it gets

The story of Limbo is...well I can’t really say. You play a nameless boy who wakes up in a forest. You encounter some monsters and a few people as you progress but there’s no exposition whatsoever. Any story elements are either spelled out elsewhere or left to the imagination of the player. There is a girl you seem to be chasing, but whom you can never quite catch. All of this is rendered in stark black and white silhouettes with a grey fogginess to everything. Color does not exist in the world of Limbo, only shades of light and dark. You also have no HUD or on-screen display at all, just the Boy’s silhouette with twin points of light as eyes. It’s quite haunting, and it feels like there’s real depth to some of the backgrounds, almost like a real place receding into the foggy distance. Audio is also very minimalist, with a few sound effects but no real background music. It all adds up to give the game a hauntingly ethereal, almost dream-like feel.

This isn't what I mean when I say the game is creepy...

Gameplay seems at first like a standard platform-puzzler. You move & jump with the D-pad and interact with the CTRL key. But a funny thing happens as you play. You begin to notice that puzzle mechanics are almost never repeated. Normally when you play a game of this type you’ll encounter a ‘type’ of puzzle and keep encountering it throughout the rest of the game. In Limbo you just...don’t. The techniques you use to fight the Spider early on aren’t repeated again the rest of the game. It’s a little disconcerting at first, sort of like a violation of the natural order. But it becomes refreshing after a while. There’s no fat or filler on this game whatsoever. Which contributes to it’s main problem: it’s shortness. According to Steam I played the game for 3 hours, which I think is a little generous. I know smaller games of this nature don’t need to span 100 hours, but under 3 hours feels too small for a $10 game. What time you have with the game is tremendous, but it ultimately feels unsatisfying.

...this is what I mean by creepy

I also encountered a few small bugs. I’d reach a puzzle which was truly unsolvable because some item failed to spawn or some trigger failed to trip. It would work fine when I reloaded, but bugs of this nature have to be noted. Some of the puzzle solutions were also so difficult and obtuse that I had to look them up online.

Score: (3.5 out of 5 Cogs)


Michael says, "If you’re a fan of difficult puzzle games, then you’ll like Limbo. Few games manage to make the puzzles as seamless or challenging. And it’s a truly beautiful game. But it’s awfully short, even for a $10 game, and some of the puzzles are frustratingly difficult.”

[Lutheran]

Nice review and for 10 dollars IMO it is well worth it. Heck I spend 10 dollars on 90-100 minute movies a few times a month and I almost never get the enjoyment that I got from playing this game for 3-4 hours. Definitely a good game.

[menage]

Great concept wrapped in annoying mechanics.

[Darkmatter]

Do you think this plays better on the 360? Keyboards and sidescrollers don't seem to work well for me.

[Ghostbear]

Originally Posted by menage

Great concept wrapped in annoying mechanics.

This, a thousand times this. We did an entire episode on Limbo on the fudcast and that was the thought most of us came away with.

[menage]

Originally Posted by Ghostbear

This, a thousand times this. We did an entire episode on Limbo on the fudcast and that was the thought most of us came away with.

Yeah, a shame too, cause up until the spider and relevant sequences it contained I thought it was the best thing ever. Then they started to add little annoying things which I could still take for granted, but by the time the scenes became more industrialized I was so annoyed with the whole thing I didn't even finish it. Just to fiddly and just not that much fun to actually play.

The puzzles were nice, but once you couple that to pixelperfect timing and platforming to make it out I'm not enjoying myslef. I hate stuff like that.

[Ink Asylum]

There was only one puzzle that was so frustrating for me that it was annoying: where the mine cart rolls into the button under the electrified platform. Other than that I had no problem with the game.

[Karak]

Luved the game thanks for the review

[TheKeck]

Just finished the game. LOVED it. It was short, but I thought it was excellent. I don't have the same complaints a lot of you seemed to, other than it was very short, of course. Also, it seemed to just skip me past one puzzle after I died on it a few times. I think it was a glitch.

But yeah, I thought the puzzles and gameplay were magnificent and the whole art direction has me in wonder. I loved the subtle storytelling somewhat similar to Portal. It has me wanting to know more.

[tacitus]

I just picked up Limbo again - its not too short for me because I am a rather inept platformer in the sense I understand the solution but keep dying in the same place grotesquely.