For my first piece for the blog, I’ve decided to review an interesting little arcade game which came out just a couple days ago. As many of you probably know, Xbox Live’s “Summer of Arcade” program has started now, and the first of the games in this program is Limbo. This is a game of the most basic kind in its mechanics; a 2D platformer of the kind which gamers have played hundreds of before. But the uniqueness of Limbo is entirely in the incredible, and beautiful presentation.
Limbo presents a stark, frightening world in which everything, including your character, is shown only in silhouette against the eerie, dark background, lit only by the intermittent rays of light which show through into this dark world. There is no real music in the game, the soundtrack being comprised almost completely of ambient noise and at certain points specific musical tones, which seems to fit perfectly the dark, mysterious atmosphere that the game tries to create.
One thing you should know; you will die in this game, a lot. Often it is truly impossible to make it through certain sections without dying at least once by something you cannot see. But the very efficient checkpoint system ensures that almost all the time, you will be checkpointed immediately before there is a point at which you can die, alleviating the frustration many other games can cause in killing you in ways which often there is no way you can prepare yourself for.
A fairly short while after you start the game, you’ll realize Limbo is not just a platformer, but a puzzle game, the puzzles using the realistic feeling physics engine to its full potential. It’s a very strange breed of game in its puzzles. Often in games that rely on puzzles, the solutions feel very arbitrary. In Limbo however, though the solutions to certain puzzles can be rather abstract, I found that in almost all cases they did make sense. Other than a few spots, in which precise timing was necessary, I never found the game particularly challenging, but it does require you to think, and the mysterious beauty of the game will keep you engaged throughout.
As for the story, the only real narrative comes from a very short piece of writing on the games download page, leaving you to produce your own ideas as to what exactly is going on when the game opens with no writing, no narrative of any kind, to find yourself playing as this boy, alone in the middle of a dark forest. It is not a particularly long game; I finished it in around five or six hours, but it is a game you truly should experience. At the very least try the demo, and see what you think. The full game costs 1200 Microsoft points, as do all “Summer of Arcade” games, but I can guarantee you that after playing the demo you will want to see where it goes from there, and you should.
-TOA DOOM
