Limbo, at the time of its Windows release around 2012, was one of those titles I had no idea existed, until I played it at a friend's place on PC. Main reason for that was that I really wasn't interested in new games.
My latest device was a GBA for ages and I still managed to find games on old machines to complete, whilst my imagination of modern games was mostly 3D design and overwhelming input with complicated controls and the need to invest loads of time and concentration. And Wii games usually too casual on the other hand.

Though I'm really into old and b/w movies, so having no aversion like many of the younger folks do, the simple but beautiful grey scale design inspired by German Expressionism wasn't what caught my attention in the first place. Actually, because of the title, I had expected a dancing game.
My love with Limbo began, when I was forced to take the pad in hand to play.
It just feels so natural exploring the eerie landscape and dive deeper into physics of a sombre, unknown territory. It's kind of a modern take on the old days, when you put in Pitfall or Jungle Hunt. That have been really crude graphics, but enough to trigger your imagination adding up to adventures larger than life.

The moment you gruesomely die and don't want the nightmare to end is when you realize you're hooked. I guess it must have been when I had to find out how to get past a huge spider that literally pierced me over and over again.
I never finished Limbo that day though and here is where the Nintendo Switch version comes into play. I got introduced to the Switch at the same friend's house, but never got one myself until the OLED version was unleashed. Now looking for games and Limbo being on discount was the ideal moment.

I know things have happened since Limbo's release, like danish programmers Playdead released their follow up Inside. But a great game has to stay at least a good game no matter how much time has passed.
Now, I always liked puzzles and platforming. I guess if you liked to play something as Kwirk or Plok like me, you can understand where Limbo clicks into connection here.

It's not breathless action until maybe the final sections, so what I like is I can usually slow down between tasks and think what I want to do. And even if not, it's very pleasant you can run into it until you pass. The save points are very convenient, so there's usually little to memorize, compared to back in the day, when Jump'n'Runs expected you to learn complete level designs, having you fall back to the start for any lethal mistake.

Old platformers are sometimes awfully short if you look back at them, but with that system it took a while to master them.
But Limbo's being comfortable makes it also appear not too complex. Sure, you've got to take your time to internalize the mechanics, like how to move with a friggin maggot stuck into your head, having an influence on control, but that's part of the learning curve. Next obstacle with a maggot, you have another task to worry about.

Actually, I had to look up information to find out the game is supposed to draw interpretations from the sentence „Uncertain of his sister's fate, a boy enters Limbo“. I just checked and it doesn't show up in the game. However, whilst Limbo itself doesn't suffer in quality depending on that knowledge, it would have helped to understand what the ending was about. Not that it really is any more specific than the bestiary and people, live or dead, you meet while manipulating objects or even physics along the way.

Though the ending felt a little underwhelming as a reward, it's the overall experience distinguishing Limbo as the brilliant adventure it is.
Having in mind it started out with just Arnt Jensen and some sketched out ideas in 2004 until he met Dino Patti via internet campaign to then establish Playdead and finance the project, Limbo is a very refined and thought through debut plenty of publishers wish they could offer.

I'm still about to play Inside, but judging from the reviews, Playdead managed to build upon that success.
Even if it will be hard to reverse engineer that initial experience when you already played newer games inspired by Limbo, I'd still highly suggest picking it up anyway.
Compared to titles like Dream Alone whose traps seem just to be designed to piss you off, Limbo has that almost flawless quality to really put you into the zone.

As mentioned above, Limbo really helped me to rebuild trust in the gaming industry. I don't know if it really had that much of an impact, but it was a door opener to find more gems hidden under what appeared to me as a surface of uninteresting next gen titles. Call me an old fart, who doesn't even use added save options, if the original didn't have one, but I've got certain schematics of what I like, represented by Tomb Raider putting an end to platforming games finally back then. I mainly played racing games after that, though GBA was enough of a throwback to pull me in.

I'm actually very happy that I could find entertainment in new titles and mechanics. In the end, there are games like Limbo out there that also got me to enjoy some of the comforts established over the years. So much, that for instance in Point'n'Click adventures, I start to avoid old games with mechanics way too complicated, after games like Strangeland showed me it doesn't have to be that way.
As the revelation Limbo was to me, I should probably give it five stars for the conversion it started.

Limbo is a visual masterpiece, and its seamless monochrome presentation will forever be its most talked-about facet. It's also a competent puzzle-platformer, though sometimes marred by frustration. The worst offences are when its emotional moments or big setpieces are undermined by its trial-and-error nature, Despite its short length, I was a bit relieved when the chapter list showed that I was nearing the end of the game, as I didn't know how many more times I could sit through its wonderfully grisly death animations.

However, once I reached the end I felt fulfilled. This despite there being no narration. Limbo does an admirable job of manipulating the player's emotions through its contextual storytelling and excellent sound design. I'm fairly certain the developers didn't have a clue what the story is about. But so what? Noel Gallagher doesn't know what Champagne Supernova is about either, and he wrote the fucking song.

Generations from now, Limbo will still stand as aesthetically timeless. A tale told entirely in silhouette, its visuals are a stroke of genius. Its lack of words lets players have an abundance of feeling. This is an extremely pretty game, and a very artsy one. Limbo is the title that pretentious hacks like Jonathan Blow wish they had made.

Já tinha jogado Inside e os 2 Little Nightmares. Esse é o game que serviu de inspiração para ambas as obras, portanto achava que seria uma experiência no mesmo nível, mas fica bem evidente que esse jogo veio antes deles.
O jogo é bom, os puzzles envolvendo uma física bem responsiva e várias coisas já existiam desde aqui, mas sua formula foi consideravelmente aprimorada pelos jogos sucessores, que acrescentaram uma maior participação das criaturas, um pouco mais de tempo de jogo e uma história mais rica.

One of those games that I, ever since its release back in 2010, thought "I need to play that sometime!" about. It only took some 13-14 years (time is not real).

It feels like this was one of the Iconic Indie Games of that era and that i saw sceenshots of it everywhere, and it has (had?) very unique and quite beautiful graphics, so it's no wonder people talked about it. The indie scene wasn't as big as it is now and there weren't really a lot of games that looked like this. I appreciate this game for what it brought to the table in 2010, and I had a good time with it :) I just think that it would impress me more if i played it when it was new, since the uniqueness of Limbo doesn't feel quite as unique in 2024. Which is fine! The graphics are still as beautiful now as back then.
But I do think that the gameplay and puzzles, while fun enough, are just okay, and the "atmospheric silent storytelling" of this type has been done so often now that it doesn't really create the Wow factor that it might have done back in the day (I'm sorry Limbo! I know you were one of the first!).

But yeah definitely give it a try if you're curious about it! I'm glad I did, it was nice to finally play this piece of Indie Video Game History (TM). It has beautiful graphics and some fun puzzles (and spiders!). Grab it at a sale sometime if you feel like it! :^D





(the spider should have been in more parts of the game)

Thrown around for 0$ on multiple occasions by now, with it being free of any price tag Limbo is a pretty great 2-3 hour experience. There's a really thick atmosphere, plenty of great sound effects (love the rumbling) and build-up in presenting its dangers up to around mid-way, when the natural, living enemies completely switch to the mechanical challenges and puzzles.

Its greatest strengths lie the beginning—seeing the spider, the other kids hunting you, and eventually overcoming the big beast—and the transition into the human-made contraptions. You jumpstart a generator and boom: rainfall. Did you open up the ceiling or did you just create a natural phenomena?

There's always been a lot of theorizing about Limbo, but with the release of INSIDE, I'm pretty sure that this was supposed to be like that story: a testing facility for all these different weapons or contraptions, but in here you, the kid the player controls, are breaking in and out of the intended areas in order to find your missing sister. There are some very situational moments, such as only being able to cross a pond because a kid controlled by the bug (the mind-controlling bug returns in Inside) walks into it, allowing you to jump on the dead body, which have me thinking that there is some controlled aspect to it, like something is watching, or that there is an element of "you shouldn't be here."

The later parts are just not as engaging as the opening act. The game should have stuck with the more nature-based dangers. Those were the most tense moments, and if you expect more of that then you are just simply not gonna get it. The bug sections are cool but they don't hold a candle to the spider sections, and I don't think the team behind Limbo really succeeded in telling this story, and that's why Inside reimagines many of its beats but takes it in different directions, for many much more interesting ones. I'm still more into the atmosphere found here, but I will be giving Inside another shot soon, so who knows, maybe I, like everyone else, will just forget Limbo.

For now, I still want to remember it. I think its simple style of presentation and its gameplay were very inspirational for future games, even AAA ones. And there's still ideas worth revisiting in here. Maybe Inside really is a better package for them and I am yet to really appreciate that, but I feel like some stuff is yet to be touched, and as such it comes with a recommendation. Even its worst parts, just like its best parts, are super short, so even if just for stats padding, Limbo is still worth playing.

⌚ Time to finish - 3 hours 48 minutes
🤬Difficulty - easy - medium

🔊 Soundtrack - not much sound
🌄Graphics – Didn't think black and white can look so pretty. Very unique looking.
🌦 Atmosphere – Nice. Basic sound cues and environmental sounds
📚 Main Story / Characters – No story, had to look it up to figure out he was searching for his sister
🤺 Combat – None
🧭 Side Activities / Exploration – None
🚗 Movement/Physics – Good, overall made sense and responded how i think it should have which is saying a lot for platformers.
📣 Voice acting – None

📝 Review:

I have been focus on platformers as its a genre I suck pretty badly at. I went straight to Ori and boy was that a trial by fire introduction to platformers. I think this is a great early platformer. I am playing this in the middle of taking a break from the escape stage of Ori and the blind forest. Its refreshing to tackle an easier platformer with puzzles, which is refreshing since constant platforming can be frustrating. Apart from 1-2 WTF puzzles at the very end puzzles that I had to look up most were intuitive or made sense and enough subtle clues (sound, visual, etc) were given to self solve. Definitely worth a play!

💡Final Thoughts:

Play it! well worth the short time it takes! Will definitely be playing the sequel.

LIMBO starts with you playing as a small child wandering through a forest, braving the many horrors within in pursuit of a mysterious something. After playing the dev’s later effort, INSIDE, going through this game was… interesting, mostly in terms of what seems similar and what the dev team seemed to learn in the years succeeding. For a horror platformer, I wouldn’t really say there’s much of an atmosphere: as opposed to less tangible things sound or music design, most of what you encounter here is rather concrete, from the simple yet evocative enemy designs and the rather brutal death animations that manage to shine even if the monochrome, silhouetted artstyle does a bit more harm than good. Most interesting is how the game seems to draw a bit from masocore performers. You’re expected to die a lot, and generally not for fair reasons. From random traps in the ground, puzzles and mechanics you can only intuit in the heat of the moment, to points where you don’t know what exactly is going to happen, one thing is made clear: this world is cruel, and it’s mostly cruel for cruelty’s sake. It’s certainly… bleak — and there’s never any point of relative respite in the middle of it — but it does provide a… relatively unique thematic throughline, one that characterizes the game even in lack of a more abstract atmosphere. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I liked this as much as INSIDE, but as one of the first post-Braid-artsy-indie-puzzle-platformers, it’s fairly solid, and an interesting look at what the landscape of the early indie game boom was li- wait what do you mean there’s still two thirds of the game left to go?

…

…

LIMBO is a game that outstays its welcome. Before I played it, most of what I’d seen of it — most of the gameplay footage in YouTube videos mentioning the game, however brief — was content that was mostly in the first hour. I was under the impression that it mostly took place in the forest, that the giant spider you ran from was a threat that followed you throughout the game, and that finally managing to turn the tables on it represented the climax, the end of the game soon to follow. In one way, I was right: the game as I knew it did end, and the remaining two hours felt like something else entirely.

The ‘horror’ aspect of the game disappears almost completely — perhaps a consequence of how it was only held up by the more concrete aspects mentioned above: when those are gone, there’s nothing really there to keep the mood up, or really make the game feel like anything. While there’s the occasional bit of grotesque design, or a slightly gnarly death animation, it feels like the game drops a lot of whatever thematic material it had to become a more generic puzzle platformer where you push boxes onto switches to open the door forward. New mechanics are introduced, but it feels like none of them really interact with each other or the general setting: you just suddenly come across machines that change the direction gravity operates and oops that’s the core game mechanic now. The masocore elements still exist within the platforming and some of the puzzles — this is a game where you’re expected to die a lot — but it never feels particularly charming or meaningful. While other 'impossible' platformers of the time, such as I Wanna Be The Guy or Cat Mario, were often defined by having a sense of humour in how they chose to pull the rug under the player, intending to bait a reaction or at least let the player laugh with the game, LIMBO doesn't particularly treat your deaths with any gravitas: you fail, you wait through the wayyy long death animation, then you reload at the checkpoint. No real surprise, no real reaction other than 'okay, well, I'm dead now.' I guess ‘things are dark and bleak and also fuck you you die’ is at least a loose theme, but on its own, it doesn’t feel like enough. And without anything to really back it up beyond the direct game elements, it doesn’t feel like it coalesces into anything, just a loosely unpleasant undertone that forgot to leave with everything else the game had going for it.

Which is not to the game’s benefit, because rather than just becoming a rather standard puzzle platformer, it instead becomes a rather standard puzzle platformer which is really, really frustrating to play. This mostly comes down to what feels like a disconnect between these two separate things, where progress is determined by you figuring out all the moving pieces and solving the puzzle to find a way forward, while the masocore elements try to make that as obtuse and annoying as possible. It’s like having a jigsaw in front of you except your cat or your baby brother keeps taking pieces from you and hiding them around the house: you’re often missing something that’s the key to actually making progress, and the game makes a point at actively hiding that element from you. Say, a puzzle where it turns out you need a second box, when that second box is in a completely different area, past an enemy, in a place that does not seem like there’s anything there and in a game where you’ve never before this point had to go left instead of right.

Not to mention how tight and uncompromising a lot of the timings and solutions are. There’s a puzzle where you have to use a minecart to get onto a rail track, which you have to run across before the minecart presses a button that electrifies the ground below you. There is no wiggle room: you have to find the exact place on the slope to jump onto the minecart, both high enough on the slope so that you have enough time to run across the rail, but low enough that it doesn’t pick up speed and hit the button prematurely. The track is long enough that anything other than the exact sweet-spot means you don’t get there in time and you die. There’s no rubric to really tell where the exact place to put it is, whether a failure was because you put it too high or too low, you just have to brute force the puzzle, dying over and over again, until you somehow intuit or guess what you actually have to do. And after four or five puzzles beforehand that are exactly like that, it’s hard not to get sick of it.

Which, like, maybe that’s what the game intends. Maybe it’s meant to feel bleak and empty in a rather charmless way. Which, like, okay, sure, but that doesn’t then make it all that fun or interesting to interface with. Nor does it make what’s there… feel particularly deep or meaningful. Which is a shame, because the first hour still holds up. Even if it didn’t quite compare to INSIDE, it was a decently effective little platformer that worked well to blend horror with masocore elements to create something rather evocative. What follows feels much less interesting, much less purposeful, and something that I frankly got tired of playing long before I reached the end. 4/10.

Limbo and Minecraft were the games that, back in 2012, made me aware that a whole indie thing was going on in videogames. A friend of mine at the time showed them to me. Those were not heavy-gaming days for me at all, but i was familiarized with the many implications of the term “indie” in both music and cinema. And of course, indie gaming development has always been a thing, but for some reason many of us became aware of it only on those early 2010’s days. I guess the reasons on how Limbo, Minecraft and the whole indie gaming thing became so succesfull were simply two: first, a better marketing strategy. Second, and most important, the need to capitalize an ever-growing distaste for the state of videogames throughout 2000’s, where the exagerated attention to the technical aspects of a game led to a culture that was becoming more and more exclusive and hard to access. You couln’t be a gamer in those days if you didn’t have the best PC or the newest gaming consoles. That’s what kept me away from videogames for many years, and i guess many people dealt with the same issue during that period.

Minecraft was interesting at the time i guess, but what really stuck in my mind in a whole different level was Limbo. I’ve never played a game with such a unique art direction in my whole life. Creating such an impressive atmosphere with so little technical elements was a new thing. Seriously? A game that almost looks like german expressionism? I was blown away. I didn’t thought that was possible as an artistic direction in video-games. In my mind at that time, videogames were always going in two directions: Hollywood or anime.

I finally got to play Limbo by myself after many years and i have to say that, sadly, i’m abandoning it again. At some point at the second half it just gets too frustrating. It’s really tiring starting over and over during the same checkpoint. It’s also way too frustrating to rely so much on a walkthrough. In other games i wouldn’t mind checking some walkthrough, but in a platform game, relying so much at them, it just doesn’t feel right.

Nevertheless, i totally enjoy what i could enjoy of Limbo. It’s just that, at some point, it’s stop being a game for me. But it’s impossible to deny how much of a masterwork this game is. Truly a landmark of indie gaming.