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?
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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.
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…
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.
DeemonAndGames
6 months ago