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Should You Get...
LIMBO
A boy wakes on the edge of hell and heads into its depths in search of his sister...
Waking in Purgatory, a boy journeys back to the land of the living for one final goodbye...
Injured in an accident, a comatose child fights his way out of the darkness in his mind...
LIMBO never tells us what's going on. All the game's description gives us is that a
boy is looking for his sister, and its title calls to mind the circle on the edge of Hell-
where unbpatized children go. From that starting point, it's left to the player to come to
their own conclusion as to the story of LIMBO.
Though there is no explicit story, the creatures you meet, the obstacles you face, the world
itself, and the unrelenting aura of mystery, loneliness, and isolation that pervade the
game tell a story all their own, and leave it to you to fill in the gaps.
Every step of the way, you are opposed. There is always an obstacle before you, something
that wants to kill you horribly- and you will die a lot, and graphically. Come to think
of it, this is the first game I am aware of to feature the death of a child- and quite
a lot of it, in grisly detail.
As you go along, the obstacles you face vary widely, as do the environments. They are constantly
changing and always giving you some new place to cautiously venture into. There are no loading
screens, cutscenes, or breaks of any kind in the game. You could play from beginning
to end and it would be only one smoothly scrolling screen, which really enhances the sense that
you are being called forward, driven through terrible dangers towards something terribly
important that the world is trying to keep you from reaching. That's the beauty of the
game's story: it tells you nothing outright, but through the world you travel through and
your trials in it, a story naturally emerges in the gameplay, in the act of moving through
the environments- it's excellent.
The boy handles well and can do the usual platforming tricks, like running, jumping,
and grabbing blocks and flipping switches. But where most platformer characters have
a sort of stiffness to the way they look and feel, the boy feels soft- he feels vulnerable.
The world is a palpable threat, filled with brutal dangers, yet it never came across as
oppressive to me. The world resists you almost passively, as though through a fact of what
it is rather than by any active malice. Most of the game does not even feature enemies:
just obstacles and puzzles, not so much fighting you as just being in your way.
Those puzzles are perfectly designed as well, always challenging, sometimes enough to truly
frustrate you, but satisfying to overcome, and new puzzle elements are introduced as
you go along, keeping the game fresh. There's always a physical, platforming element to
the puzzles, so danger is always present. Nonetheless, the pacing of the game is handled
very well. Sometimes its almost relaxed, giving you time to take in the world and wonder at
it all. Other times, it's frantic and really keeps you on your toes.
I find there's this relentless quality to the game, a sort of momentum in the way you
press ever onward through a strange land to a fate you do not know. You really want to
see the boy through to the end safely, find closure for his story, find a place where
he can finally rest. In retrospect, I realize the game does feel much like you're guiding
a lost spirit to a place of rest through a hostile place between this world and the next.
But then again, that's one more interpretation, and the game leaves itself open to many. And
I can definitely say that LIMBO is a game worth finding your own interpretation of.