Limbo

Sometimes a title card can tell you everything. Limbo’s white text is presented in large, blocky font, looking as if it were cut from cardboard, offset by a pure-black background — nothing else is on the screen. The game’s intentions are pretty clear: It wants to pretend video games existed during German Expressionism and that this is the gem we all missed.

The game itself, a 2-D puzzle platformer, keeps things as minimalistic as its black-and-white presentation. Limbo throws one trap or puzzle at a time, often driving you into lunacy because of the simplicity of it all. Sometimes it’s because of a puzzle that feels impossible, but most of the time it’s because of the game’s frequent deathtraps that serve only to ruin the pace and frustrate players. One can imagine they are an attempt at dark humor, with how violent the death animations are for what is ostensibly a prepubescent boy.

While the pacing and visual style might turn away most players, it’s hard not to admire the dedication to a unique vision that Playdead have brought with its debut game. At its best, Limbo casts a spell on you with its surreal ambiance and haunting setting.

First half of Limbo is a masterpiece. The game carefully immerses the player in the atmosphere of loneliness through puzzles revealing the narrative and haunting art design. Meanings of Limbo are well readable and at that moment it seems like the game is going to achieve quality of Journey.
However, in the second half, developers decided to throw all the "plot" out of the puzzles and put the gamer in some random factory to get through. And even though the puzzles are very good (one of them forced me to check the walkthrough, which hasn't happened in a long time), there is nothing between them. In the end, you literally get tired of the game.
I am disappointed.

Principalmente depois de Inside, já não tem a mesma força nem transmite a mesma sensação de novidade que em 2012.

Mas pouco importa. Limbo tem um visual fabuloso e puzzles excelentes, e é no geral um jogaço.

“Limbo is like the Joy Division of video games” - My summary blurb of Limbo upon first finishing it about six years ago.

If those of you on rateyourmusic are familiar with my ever-so-popular list comparing video games to albums, this comparison was the first one that I made that ignited the list. What exactly does that mean though? Is comparing Limbo to the music of the iconic post-punk band Joy Division a baseless comparison? Considering both are from entirely different artistic mediums, there is a little bit of creative leeway in comparing the two. As I’m sure most people are aware, Joy Division’s music is very dark and dreary. This seemed appropriately so considering the mental state of frontman Ian Curtis, a tortured soul whose anguish seeped into the bleak spirit of Joy Division’s music. Even though their sound proved to be incredibly influential to the fellow post-punk bands that followed, none of them could truly match the atmosphere, nihilistic dreariness, and cathartic beauty of Joy Division. Their imitators came off sounding disingenuous by comparison, romanticizing the darkness a bit too much and coming off as goth in the process, and Joy Division was never goth. They focused much too heavily on the darker aspects of Joy Division’s music while missing a point of the brooding minimalism that was pertinent to Joy Division’s atmosphere. One can’t forget how effective the one-note, open-fretted bassline is to “I Remember Nothing” in evoking the dark atmosphere the band always tries to create. Limbo is an indie platformer that is dark, dreary, and evokes an atmosphere similar to Joy Division’s music. Limbo is a game that I also feel is mislabeled as a horror game just as Joy Division is mislabeled as goth. Limbo is a creepy game on the surface, but its progression, atmosphere, and esoteric elements bring forth a certain depth that I wouldn’t classify as horror. Its darkness is a little harder to classify just like Joy Divisions.

Limbo is an indie game from Swedish developer Playdead, and this was the studio’s first-ever output. It was featured in Microsoft’s 2010 “Summer of Arcade”, an annual event that showcased the Xbox 360’s indie titles like Braid and Castle Crashers in years before. Given that most of the previous Xbox indie titles had minimalist tendencies and borrowed heavily from old-school genres, it would be expected of Limbo to feel like a game that was dusted off from the crevices of nostalgia. Limbo’s base genre in terms of gameplay is a 2D platformer, but you’d be hard-pressed to execute the same acrobatics as Mario. All the playable character in Limbo can do is walk and jump a few feet into the air with the occasional moving of a box or another object. Limbo falls more under the cinematic platformer genre, a style that relishes restrained controls to either give higher precedence to a story or use the jumping as a means for something other than climbing onto platforms. Limbo’s gameplay is heavily based on puzzles. This is to the extent that every single section of the game is based around one puzzle after the other and the puzzles themselves are the chapters that divide this game. The range of puzzles is incredibly diverse and it’s what makes the game consistently interesting. Some puzzles are a matter of finding a platform to use to reach another area and some will force the player to take a more methodical approach to traversal. These more circuitous puzzles appear a lot later in the game and involve gimmicks like anti-gravity and being controlled by a slug that latches onto the character’s head. Some of the more precision-based puzzles are quite hair-raising because the precision usually has an ultimatum of death if the player does not execute them properly. This ranges from being electrocuted, shot, sawed in half, impaled by the leg of a giant spider, etc.

With all of these gruesome deaths in mind, I still do not consider Limbo to be a horror game. There are some hectic moments in the game, but the elements of Limbo combined with the consistent atmosphere do not strike me as something that appropriately fits into the horror genre. If this is a horror game, then it’s certainly not a conventional one. The most readily noticeable attribute to Limbo is its aesthetics. The game is presented in a monochrome color scheme strictly consisting of black and white. It makes the foreground seem like it’s shrouded in a surrealistic fog. It’s an aesthetic choice that compliments the minimalistic gameplay superbly. The monochrome color immediately reminds me of Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1932 film Vampyr, a film with an incredibly similar aesthetic and an ethereal, surrealistic atmosphere. Vampyr is also a work that is miscategorized into the horror genre, or at least in the traditional sense. The horror presented in Vampyr is less about offering fictional terrors that frighten the audience due to their otherworldliness and setting a simultaneously discomforting and striking mood and atmosphere. Horror is a genre that has to be set on some grounds of reality in order for it to be scary, contrasting one’s comfortable reality with something disquieting. In both Limbo and Vampyr, the atmosphere and aesthetic are so consistent that the world it presents feels so alien to the reality that all of the factors of it are commonplace. The spider chasing you down near the beginning of the game isn’t scary when the rest of the world is just as hostile. This isn’t a criticism of the game, however. The game does not need to have a heavy emphasis on building terror for the player.

Similar to Vampyr, Limbo’s progression and lack of narrative structure also does not tend well to the horror genre. I feel as if the horror genre needs a bit of context in order to make it horrifying. In Limbo, you play as a boy whose only distinctive physical feature is his glowing eyes. The rest of him is just as dark as the world he inhabits. He runs through the world of this game puzzle after puzzle, never really deviating from the linear route the game presents. There is no set objective or mission on this boy’s journey, but only a vague initiative to keep going and never turn back. He ventures from wooded areas to dark, abandoned industrial landscapes that are so reminiscent of the backdrops from Eraserhead. These industrial settings then make a turn for the futuristic when the game implements the aforementioned anti-gravity puzzles. Eventually, a gravity puzzle catapults the protagonist into an invisible glass casing that shatters in slow motion. He slowly hoists himself back up to find himself back in the wooded area where he started. It’s here where the game seems cyclical, a punishment for the character to endure. However, he soon finds a silhouette of a girl and then the game ends. “Limbo”, the title of the game, gives away exactly what the ambiguous narrative is supposed to convey: the concept of a state of purgatory. It’s a place between life and death that carries a great sense of directionless wandering. In Limbo’s case, this wandering is more literal as the protagonist is venturing through the void without any clear purpose or context. If this is a horror game, then it’s an intrinsic horror that verges on nihilism. However nihilistic the game might present itself, there is an underlying beauty to it. There is a light that illuminates through the substantial darkness, something that I’ve always felt about Joy Division’s 1980 album Closer. It’s dismal in context, but it conveys a sense that there is a positive aspect to a weary topic like death. As for the ending, perhaps the girl is “a guide to come and take him by the hand” (that's a lyric to Joy Division’s “Disorder” if you didn’t know), a beautiful spirit to take him away from the hostile land and to the great beyond.

Limbo is a difficult game to pigeonhole. It’s easy to confuse the darkness the game presents on the surface to fit into the genre of horror. However, all of the other elements would prove to be quite substantial. As a video game, the puzzles are all executed cleverly and gel well with minimalist controls. As a piece of art, the horrific, brooding, and grim aspects of Limbo are balanced by a light and challenging presentation that leaves an impact on the player’s mind more than just scaring them or making them feel afraid. Because of all of these nuances with a dark piece of work, the Joy Division comparisons I initially made when I first played this game still ring true to me.

F*cking emotional platform games.

While I enjoyed segments of this game on my one and only play, I was immensely bored at certain points, and I think it speaks strongly that a game with aesthetics and atmosphere this nice has such lulls in between the good of it all. It also genuinely doesn't do enough to either convey basic gameplay facets you'll never use again, or repeat the same gimmicks it's already used, or other games have. Not really something you'd expect from a couple of hour indie game, though it did come out in 2010, so I expect that they spent most of the time on non-gameplay aspects considering the state of the game. Also, maybe only my gripe, but the ending comes out of nowhere. Glitchwave (as of this review), has this for a game description: "Searching for his sister, a boy enters Limbo." Did I miss something, or was that never conveyed? Regardless, it's not a terrible experience, I just wish it didn't feel like an alpha for the game.