Uncertain of his sister's fate, a boy enters LIMBO. This puzzle-platformer was one of many great indie games I knew by its universal acclaim and little else. And so I bought it because I felt I ought to. That was my main motive and at £3.49 it seemed stupid not to (a traditional Steam Sale excuse). But with big flashy AAA titles released in increasing numbers it sadly got buried and I guiltily neglected a title that got IGN’s Best Game of 2010 as well as Reader’s Choice. So when I finally clicked ‘Play’ I realized I was quite excited to see what the fuss was about.
Most notable of these encounters is A HUGE FUCKING SPIDER. Now, I pride myself on facing my fear of spiders when I have the chance, catching them, looking them in their ungodly mass of eyes and then popping them outside. But this game had me recoiling from the screen, shivering and genuinely scared. And it’s brilliant. I was so bloody desperate to solve some of the puzzles because of that lanky arachno-bastard that I swear my brain broke open a few extra synapses for emergency’s sake. One particular sequence sees the Nameless Boy trying to escape a webbed tunnel and you simply have to watch as a long hairy slender leg inches toward you while you hammer away at the keyboard, pleading with your avatar to respond. But this purely primal need to escape is so well designed within this minimalist game that you never need to know any more than what you see on-screen. Unfortunately as I said at the start, this game makes a change roughly halfway through. The macabre interactions with the Spider, with mysterious armed figures, with parasitic worms give way to a solitary focus on platforming puzzles and suddenly the minimal design starts to feel sparse instead of well calculated. The design and inner workings of the game become a little less artful as you meander through a more complex series of puzzles but with fewer reasons to do so. There are still more twisted surprises but they lack the menace from the game’s first half and you’re never faced with as great a threat as THAT HUGE FUCKING SPIDER.
So in an industry that seems to have really embraced this new form of game, what did LIMBO do right that got us so hooked? Well it dared to treat us to some goddam respect. An ambiguous narrative? A mature approach to violence? No attempts to pat the player on the back while they gaze directly into an explosion? That's not how video games work right?! Well they do now. Smaller teams with smaller games can make their game's come to life with Steam spreading the word to every corner of the globe. So if you have something unique, if a real spark of greatness is there in a game, we're going to find it now. So play LIMBO. Go onto Steam right now and you can download a FREE DEMO to see what the fuss is about. Go get caught up in this stunning monochrome nightmare. The controls are simple, the levels are fascinating and the haunting tone will make you rethink what a puzzle-platformer should act like. This is Mario’s weird scary grandson but he should be proud of how interesting he is. Click on the link below to see how proud.
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Tom MidgleyI play, design and write about games when I'm not hoping for someone to pay me to do these things. Archives
October 2017
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