Limbo Review
Limbo makes a great first impression. You play as a young boy who slowly wakes up in a forest where you and everything you can interact with is completely silhouetted. All you hear is soft ambient sound from the environment and the pitter-patter of your own feet as you move. Interacting with objects - such as stepping your feet in water or climbing on tree branches - is refreshing as it is the only thing that seems to contribute additional sound. That is, until you mistakenly step in a bear trap barely identifiable amongst the grass and watch yourself be brutally dismembered. This teaches you that the shadowy world is one to walk through cautiously, and makes you yearn for quiet - loud sounds are usually punctuating your death.
Once this stage is set, there is no more to the game than moving through the environment. You feel lonely as there are rarely other living beings, and if you encounter them they are usually trying to kill you or avoid you. You’ll walk past corpses that foreshadow the dangers ahead. The loneliness drives you forward as you never feel like you want to be where you are: you want to escape. Limbo’s greatest success is preserving a sense of dread for the entire experience.
The puzzle design is always in service of this sense of dread. Much of the game’s puzzles are more aptly described as traps; navigating through them often requires dying to learn where the danger is and precise timing to escape that danger. It can be quite the rush to run, climb, and jump past obstacles with precise timing and narrowly avoid getting crushed, electrocuted, or dismembered. Runs for your life can be triggered by clever puzzles that make use of the momentum of objects, or levers that trigger dangerous environmental changes such as rising water levels, electrocuted surfaces, or advancing sawblades.
Unfortunately the platforming skill required for many puzzles often robs you of the satisfaction of solving them. Puzzle platformers are fun because they make you feel smart for figuring out the environment traversal puzzles laid before you; the mechanic of platforming is used because it’s simple to understand and execute.
Limbo’s platforming is not so simple: the basic move set is very demanding of the player’s timing. As a game that is so intentional with its art and sound design, it seems audio and visual cues to aid in timing are purposefully omitted to raise the difficulty. You can often find yourself having solved the puzzle and knowing exactly what you need to do to get through the environment yet unable to progress because the timing requires too much trial and error. Checkpoints are very liberally distributed to accommodate this difficulty but still don’t serve to alleviate the frustration. The satisfaction of making it through an environment alive is diminished when you’ve watched yourself die half a dozen times prior.
Limbo is a polished game that is entirely successful in providing a strikingly bleak atmosphere, but void of all but the barest skeleton of a story as motivation to progress. Because your goal is never more than to slowly move forward and many of the more complex puzzles can temper your sense of accomplishment with unnecessarily difficult platforming, I didn’t finish the game with an immediate sense of satisfaction. Still, Limbo is worth the time for a patient gamer because the journey is a unique and memorable one.
