Christmas may be traditionally a time for giving, but over the past few years it’s taken on another role: as a time for buying countless cheap games in the Steam Sale, most of which you’ll never get around to playing.
This year, I bucked the trend by purchasing, downloading, playing and completing Limbo – all in the same week!
Limbo has been around for a couple of years, and was one of those games I couldn’t help hearing about when it was first released. People would wax lyrical about its unorthodox style and its beauty, so much so that I grudgingly downloaded the demo from Xbox Live and played as far as I could. It was lovely, but really, it was just a platformer. Wasn’t it?
Upon downloading the full game this Christmas, I started out with exactly the same thoughts. Yeah, the black-and-white, film-grain, silhouetted main character schtick is a lovely device, one to keep in your back pocket when a “games as art” discussion kicks off on your local pretentious Internet forum, but can you drag that out to an entire game? Luckily, for all my initial thoughts about Limbo being just another platformer, I found that there really is more to it than that.
As “The Boy”, you’re drawn into a mysterious world, the eponymous Limbo, where everything is in shadow and nothing is explained. For that reason, it reminded me of the Amiga classic Another World, except the plot here is even more undeveloped, to the point of nonexistence. All you know is that you’re alone – most of the time – in this Limbo, and you need to escape. Escape, it seems, is always just off the right-hand side of the screen.
With so many unanswered questions in the world, I couldn’t help but keep coming back for more. Who had left the helpful boats and, frankly, less helpful traps scattered around the world? What were these blurry, monochrome environments I could just about make out in the background? I was hoping for an answer.
Soon, I reached a point in the game where I suspected that answers would not be forthcoming. But luckily, at that point, the game’s puzzles took over as its main appeal. Inventive, 2D physics-based puzzles, including a few where the entire game world revolves with you inside it. From that moment, it began to feel less like Another World and more like a direct-control adventure game. One where you die an awful lot – which reminds me of some other game. Oh yeah. Another World.
I may be over two years late to the Limbo party, but I’m glad I joined in eventually. Limbo is a fantastically inventive 2D platformer, challenging but unlikely to be frustrating, intriguing but unlikely to disappoint with lame exposition. It’s worth every penny of the £1.74 I paid for it, and a bargain at four times the price.
P.S. If the headline “The King of Limbo” doesn’t ring any bells with you, you owe it to yourself to watch one of the most epic video game finales since GLaDOS warbled “this was a triumph”. I speak, of course, of the end sequence for Limbo of the Lost – the PC adventure game that infamously plagiarised most of its artwork from other games. With an end sequence like that, all is (almost) forgiven.
