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    Limbo

    Game » consists of 19 releases. Released Jul 21, 2010

    A young boy seeks to rescue his lost sister from the dreary, dangerous world of Limbo in this monochrome puzzle-platformer.

    samred's LIMBO (Xbox 360 Games Store) review

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    • samred wrote this review on .
    • 1 out of 1 Giant Bomb users found it helpful.
    • samred has written a total of 2 reviews. The last one was for Rez HD

    Living with Loss: Where LIMBO Takes Us

    This review is taken from my published piece at The Atlantic in Washington, DC. The original can be found online here
     
     What life awaits after death? Most forms of expression, from books and films to poetry and philosophy, have taken turns pondering on it, and the maturing world of video games is no exception.

    LIMBO, in spite of all appearances, isn't one of those games. The brief, downloadable video game for Xbox 360 appears to dwell in the afterlife—and beautifully so—with creepy inhabitants, a black-and-white aesthetic, absence of conversation, and balance of darkness and light. Yet the Danish title is most compelling because it speaks to the struggles of living with loss, not fading away into death; and it does so not with text, nor with musical cues, nor any concrete storytelling. You simply drop into LIMBO, and it forces you to find your own meaning through exploration, puzzle solving, and inhaling its lonely world along the way.

    The game opens with a child's silhouette waking in a shades-of-gray world, himself all black save his tiny, white eyes. With no story as impetus, players immediately encounter forests, ponds, and caves (and strange foes within each), all rendered in 2-D with shimmering particle effects, as if LIMBO's entirety had been drowned in fresh, falling ash. Other than occasional tones and background effects, the sounds are as simple as the boy's feet plodding along grass, dirt, and hard metal, and the sound direction turns out far more colorful and organic than the fuzzed-out looks would lead you to believe.

    Players are limited to running, jumping, and grabbing certain objects, which makes the ingenuity of Playdead Studios' puzzles so striking. Every "a-ha!" moment is a spoiler in the making. Anyone who has played the puzzle game Braid will be tempted to compare the two games, but LIMBO skips such puzzle gimmicks, instead forcing players to consider every bit of the sparse environment as a means of progression. Dead bodies, turning cogs, hungry birds, gravity switches, and dangerous boulders each reveal themselves as greater figures in seemingly simple puzzles, and their respective moments will last in gaming's lexicon for a long time, ranking with the head-scratching likes of Metal Gear SolidShadow of the Colossus, and Portal.

    LIMBO can run as short as four or five hours in the first go-round, which is tragic since its puzzles are brilliant, and the game doesn't wear out its welcome with, say, time-travel tweaks or a specific, limited item. LIMBO could probably have kept on going another hour or so without anybody getting bored. To be fair, as a concentrated experience, its every region is stark and memorable in spite of the black-and-white sheen, both in looks and in puzzles that prove familiar and exciting even on a second playthrough. (Those regions shine when you force a huge change in the world, like yanking a hidden switch to change the weather or power down a dilapidated hotel.)

    That stark brevity fits the game's understood purpose: to present a boy in search of a lost sibling, a boy who's desperate, quiet, and willing to proceed left-to-right without any plot or outright provocation. As such, we too follow along without asking questions. We solve puzzles and brave confusing foes because we "have" to. The wordless inspiration, and the game's overt nod to it, rises above the game's astonishing qualities—its beauty, its economy of sound, its puzzles, its fluid control, even its never-too-hard difficulty—to make this 2010's best video game so far.

    This is not a game about death, but about living, and unlike any other form of expression, we learn that in the game of LIMBO by living it.    

    Other reviews for LIMBO (Xbox 360 Games Store)

      My Limbo Review 0

      This little boy awakes in the darkness, what we see is just a shadow of his body, where is he? In Limbo. This game is beautiful in the eye, black and white, shades of grey. This small 2-D platform game, is about a boy in search of his sister, in this world of paranormal fluently created puzzles, that persistanly can leave you feeling like, is that really going to work?  What I enjoyed about the game the most was the fluency of the game, is something that you can start and actually play all the w...

      21 out of 24 found this review helpful.

      LIMBO Review 0

         LIMBO is one of those games that’s going to be hard to review let alone talk about without treading the line of the “spoiler zone.” PlayDead has created a beautiful game in the same vein as Braid or the recent P.B. Winterbottom. The simplicity of the controls doesn’t hamper the challenge that waits in LIMBO; expect to have some interesting concepts thrown at you. With LIMBO, PlayDead has set out to create a game that would make them a staple in gamer’s minds, and the story that unfolds is ...

      16 out of 19 found this review helpful.

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