Limbo

I'm not a fan of old school 2d platformers. That's why I didn't play Limbo when it was first released. But I bought it on sale on PSN, and I was surprised by how much I liked it. The dark, colorless atmosphere is creepy and engaging. But the puzzle solving is what had me staying up late playing. I doubt I'll be playing it much in the future, but I enjoyed it while it lasted.

Game developer Playdead's 2010 downloadable platform/puzzle game "Limbo" has quickly joined the ranks along with "Shadow of the Colossus", "Metal Gear Solid" and "Heavy Rain" as a strong contender in the argument of video gaming being a valid form of the arts. The game is a revolution for platform and puzzle gaming, and the visual style pushes it to breathtaking heights. This is one of the finest games available for download on the Microsoft X-Box 360 or Sony Playstation 3.

The story is minimalistic- you play a nameless young boy, pursuing a young girl through a hellish domain of forest and decaying cityscape, forced to solve treacherous and life-threatening puzzles to stay alive and proceed. There is no dialog and music is kept to a bare minimum.

The first thing that attracts most people to this game is the dark, unsettling visual style. Almost the entire game is played in silhouette- your character and his immediate environment is pitch black, save for the young boys paper-white eyes. Fog generally obscures portions of the background, but you will also see layer after layer of gray-scale trees, structures and buildings in the background. The game is easily comparable to old black-and-white film noir, or German expressionism in terms of visual stylings. There is a complete absence of color, leading to elements like fire, sparks and water having an oppressive, blurred white effect that is almost hyper-real, and therefore even more threatening.

As mentioned above, there is absolutely no dialog, and an almost complete lack of music. Instead of music, we are treated to the sounds of the environment- the patter of feet against the ground, the groaning of metal, or the wind whipping through the trees. Only in certain rare cases will there be tones in the background. Not even traditional music, just haunting tones that prophesize coming dangers or triumphs. Again, it has an almost hyper-real quality.

Controls are extremely tight, simple and responsive. Which is a great help for the intricate platforming and puzzles within the game.

This is a game of puzzles, more or less. The entire game is divided into chapters/challenges (although there is no official level system, there is a chapter selection screen through the pause menu), and each one increases in intricacy and difficulty. While your first few puzzles are relatively straight forward (pushing and pulling boxes, etc), over time the evolve into hellish and inhuman heights. By the second half of the game, you will find yourselves in environments that spin and have gravitational shifts, involve the use of magnetism, and involve increasingly deadly booby-traps. Combined with the unsettling visuals and disturbingly low-key audio, the deadly puzzles turn this game into an ultimate experience of horror and mystery. I have not been so frightened of a game in my life since the original "Fatal Frame", which to me is one of the single most frightening experiences of fiction in my life.

I have to give this game a perfect 10. It has something for most gamers. For those looking for a standard platforming adventure, this will deliver. For those seeking a suggestive and provocative mind- bender with an artsy flair, this will astound them. This is the rare perfect game.

Take a game with no color, no dialogue, no 3D, and a musical score so subtle it might as well be ambient noise. In most cases that sounds like a terrible game, but Limbo pulls it off incredibly well. This indie release has received much deserved praise for its simplicity, yet very effective gameplay. I think this game masters one aspect incredibly well, and that is the sound of the environment. Heavy footsteps, loud electrical crackles, and scurrying spider steps all are done to perfection to a point where no background noise is necessary at all. 2-D sidescrollers have been done to death, but Limbo feels almost entirely original because of how it is presented. The plot is very simple and almost doesn't need to exist for this game to work. It is more about the tension, and players will be on edge the first time they play this game. The platforming, with some exceptions, is satisfactory. The game is a bit short, but much like Portal, this game is better because it is shorter, not overstaying its welcome. I did have a few gripes about some of the ludicrous amount of precision required for certain platforming sections, and some false paths will lead you to nowhere except certain death, but all in all it is a unique little platformer that I am glad is in my collection.

This game is a dark game in which you complete puzzles to go to the next stage.

It is very rewarding and it is great black and white game.

I had seen photos and videos of this game and thought that it would be fun to play. A bit of a platform game with some puzzles to solve. I ended up getting it on the PS4 system and I will say that I enjoyed the game, but at a certain point in the game it just stopped being as fun and atmospheric as the beginnings. Basically, when you got out of the woods and into the industrial type setting, the game just lost some of what made it so entertaining in the earlier stages.

The story, from what everyone seems to deduce has a boy waking up in the middle of a creepy forest. They then speculate that he is hunting for his sister, though not sure why it could not be his girlfriend or just a friend rather than a sister. The world he awakens in, is one of quiet and eeriness. It is also one filled with danger as there are traps and other obstacles to overcome in this nightmarish landscape!

The game play is basically a side scroll game with puzzles to figure out to get through the many obstacles present in the game. You can jump, pull things, push things and activate things. It was really entertaining during the stages when you had to get by spiders and such, but once again, the game just kind of lost its magic when you were in the world simply activating gravity plates that just did not seem to fit the motif of this world that had been created.

So, not my favorite game ever, but it had its moments. If only the game play had been more like the first portion of the game throughout I would have rated it higher. Figuring out that you could rip a spider leg off then roll the spider was just more interesting than activate this thing to make crate fall in right spot. I am wondering if these stages I am complaining about are all just add on stages for the PS4 as the original Xbox 360 version only had 24 stages while this had 39 so it may be a cause of them lengthening the game, but not really putting much effort into the stages and puzzles as they had originally done.