Limbo, on the Xbox Live Arcade, is an interesting game that shows just how far you can push the boundaries with a smaller, downloadable release. The title features a young man who suffers innumerable violent deaths through the course of the game, and before the credits roll you're lead to believe that you've accomplished your goal... possibly. Be sure to look over our final thoughts, and if you haven't bought the game yet this may be a good time to jump on board so you can join the conversation. Trust us, it's worth it.

We're going to talk about what the ending means, and some readers are going to give their own opinions after playing the game through to completion. Spoilers? You betcha, so don't read until you've finished the game for yourself.

Was this a happy ending?

One gamer wrote in to say the ending didn't fit the rest of the game. "In such a bleak and dismal world, to suddenly be faced with the happy ending was too abrupt of a turnaround for me," he wrote. "There are some who would argue the possibility that the ending wasn't as happy as we would be lead to believe, and that she wasn't his sister, or that she was somehow corrupted by the world or some other idea like that, but the fact of the matter is we aren't shown that. We are simply shown the boy reuniting with the girl." He felt a sense of triumph, but he says he doesn't share the sense of awe that other gamers are reporting.

The big question remains, why was his sister there at all? Where did the game take place?

"I believe that the boy's journey through the forest, factory, and the area towards the end with the gravity effects was some sort of test and that his reward would be the reuniting with his sister," a reader told us. "When she sat up but didn't turn around at the end, I felt that either the boy was a ghost, or that they both were dead and needed to be together one more time before moving on to the afterlife. The crashing through the glass to me symbolized that he had escaped from the world we woke up in, and moved to a forest that was the last stop before heaven or hell."

There were hints, however, that the setting was physical, and a very real part of our own world. "The final screen looked to me like the protagonist approaching his sister, with a ladder just slightly out of reach to the far right," a reader pointed out. "First, I noticed the ladder is rotted away, next I noticed two clusters of flies buzzing around. [My] immediate thought was that the protagonist and sister were unable to discover a way up the ladder, and ultimately met their demise (starvation or otherwise) together at the bottom of the ladder." A fitting end to an already dark story? It's very possible.

Open-ended stories aren't rare, but Limbo refuses to give you much evidence one way or the other; you're left to your own devices when it comes to figuring out what's going on, and one answer is just as valid as the next. "When the main menu reappeared, I had the same feeling as I do when I wake up from a particularly interesting or exciting dream that got cut short... It doesn't even offer the opportunity to let you draw your own conclusions," a gamer told Ars. "There simply isn't enough evidence to explain it, and it's wholly mystifying. I adore it."

Is the boy trying to find his sister, or is he the one who is lost?

Here's another take on the ending, and one I didn't think of at all: the sister is alive. One gamer wrote in to say just that. "That ending though...they're both dead!? This would certainly explain the morbidity of the whole game, and the flies that followed the boy everywhere, and the maggots that jumped out and started eating his brain."

This is where it gets interesting. "Now that I think of it though, maybe it's just the boy that's dead? When he approaches his sister at the end she seems more startled than anything, and it's always bright where she is."

One e-mail summed everything up. "I think that on some level, trying to find a literal narrative 'meaning' to an ending like Limbo's is kind of a 'just for fun' thing." When you make the explanations too abstract, the power of the game begins to slip away, in other words. "It seems like the boy was dead at the beginning of the game, and the events of the game take place in limbo (appropriately) between life and death... Depending on how you look at it, you could either say he died and found the little girl in the afterlife, or that he woke up and found her alive," he wrote.

"I think the idea is that it doesn't matter though, as long as he found her."