Limbo has been around since 2010 and was one of the first real indie hits back on Xbox Live Arcade. It was really one of the first downloadable games that was considered on a par with triple A titles of the time; even going on to on to get some game of the year nominations.

Eight years later and Play Dead have ported both Limbo and their newer game Inside to the Nintendo Switch. Having played Inside but never Limbo, I decided now was the time to see what everyone was talking about with this minimal, 2D platformer.

The Story

What most people found so interesting and captivating about the game is that the story is purposefully very vague. You play as a young boy in a dark and bleak looking world. The title ‘Limbo’ suggests that you are trying to fight your way out of the biblical place between heaven and hell. However, when playing the game you realise that you are searching for someone, although the game gives no indication of who that someone is.

My personal theory is that you are looking for your sister and that you’re not literally in the place Limbo, but instead are in limbo; as you don’t know whether so is ok or not. To be completely honest, the semantics of the story aren’t really that important, as the games mechanics play so heavily into the platforming and puzzle solving. However, I respect that Play Dead took an ‘artful’ approach to the game’s story and left it up to the player to make their own conclusions.

The Game

Limbo has 40 mini chapters in it that are made up of puzzles, platforming sections and story beats. The game relies heavily on physics to complete many of its challenges and I believe the game has one of the best physics engines in the indie game scene.

The puzzles are all logical, meaning that if you think about them enough you will have a Eureka moment and work out how to solve them. Some of the puzzles have you positioning boxes to reach higher platforms, and some have you manipulating gravity to jump over huge gaps. From that start puzzles are challenging but doable, with the difficultly slowly ramping up towards the end. This resulted in me have to consult a wiki on a few chapters!

I wouldn’t say they were hard, however, I think it shows how well your brain can problem solve towards the end of the game. This is because I could go for 30 minutes working out the puzzles easily on my own, but then I’d come up against one which I had no idea how to solve. For someone who’s not the biggest puzzle game fan, I liked this because it wasn’t one hard puzzle after another. They all challenged me but after a few trail and error attempts I could often see the solution.

Platforming was very fun in the game. I enjoyed how precisely Play Dead time specific things to happen as you were platforming to make you feel tense. The greatest example of that is the giant spider that creeps after you in the early game. The ever present hairy leg at the side of my screen always had me panicking, resulting in me trying to rush jumps and having a grisly end at the bottom of a canyon or on the spider’s talons. If you’ve ever played Inside, its the same feeling the dogs give you every time they chase you! It gets your heart beating and your palms sweating!

Art and Music

Limbo is arguably most famous because of its black and white minimalistic art style. The boys silhouette against the stunning background is an image that is known to nearly every hardcore gamer alive; it’s so iconic.

The boy himself I didn’t really like, I felt that his character model and animations felt a little aged compared to other characters from modern games (like Inside). You could tell he wasn’t a solid character but made up of different shapes and polygons, which made him look and feel like a marionette or a rag doll.

The backgrounds on the other hand set the tone of the game perfectly. From a dark creepy forrest to eerie industrial areas, the background artwork always looked beautiful. Especially when a ray of sunlight burst through the dark bleakness!

Musically the game is silent. What it excels at however is sound design. The sound of the spider creepy behind me will be engraved on my soul for the rest of my life! But too, what will having a lasting impact on me was the sound of the boy landing after a jump. The game and world are so quite and empty that when I think of Limbo I always hear the heavy scuff sound of him landing.

Problems

There was one puzzle type I really didn’t like in the game and that is one where a glow worm lands on your head and controls your movement. The gimmick of the puzzle is that when the worm lands on your head it forces you to go in one direction; either left or right. However, if you walk under or through light the worm will freak out and make you walk in the opposite direction.

So basically a lot of the puzzles are setting yourself up before the worm lands on you so it doesn’t force you to walk off a cliff. What I did’t like is that I felt the puzzles were always long and drawn out. They forced you to zig-zag back and forth across an area between the different light sources, until finally you walk under these weird looking creature that eat the worm. What I appreicated most about Limbo’s puzzles were that they all felt so compact and short. The ones with the worms however, seemed to last a life time!

As I said in the intro, Limbo is an eight year old game and this age is sometimes shown, especially with how long it takes to respawn after dying. It doesn’t take minutes or anything like that, but for a game that has you dying over and over again its long enough.

Finally, the biggest problem for me was that after the spider sequence of the game, the whole atmosphere and sense of urgency was gone for me. I don’t know why Play Dead didn’t have the spider following you the whole game! It would have made Limbo that much creepier and tense. I actually found myself laughing out loud at the game numerous times because of how gruesome and ridiculous the death animations looked, which again took me out of the overall atmosphere the game was trying to portray.

Plus! There is no video game capture functionality on the Switch. I wanted to share these hilarious deaths on Twitter but it wasn’t possible. This was annoying because every game on the Nintendo Switch comes with that functionality now. A developer as well known as Play Dead surly had the resources to add it in this port.

Summary

Playing Limbo is the modern era definitely shows its signs of old age. Nevertheless, it is easy to see why Limbo was such a revolution when it was released back in 2010. Overall Limbo is a good puzzle game and platformer. I really enjoyed the challenging puzzles as they were hard but doable. The art style is iconic, setting a dark and creepy tone for the game. However, I feel like lots of the atmosphere of the game is lost after the spider sequence resulting in an empty (though beautiful) world with hilarious death scenes.

Should you buy Limbo? It depends, I would say if you only had $20 to spend and could only buy one game you should definitely pick up Inside. However, if you’ve already beat Inside and liked the dark world and logical puzzles, then Limbo should certainly be next on your list.

That’s why I give Limbo by Play Dead Games my rating of

What do you think of my review? Would you argue Limbo is better than Inside? Let me know over on Twitter or join the indie game conversation on Discord.

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