Unsurprisingly, I don’t like games that make me feel dumb. So whenever I stumbled with the perplexing conundrums in platform-puzzler Limbo, I turned increasingly sour. An Xbox Live Arcade title, Limbo casts you as a boy who must platform and puzzle-solve his way across the dark and disturbing discard plane to discover his sister’s fate.
This premise is soon lost in the shadowy art direction, which is a shame, because it feels like an opportunity missed.
For developers, balancing the difficulty of puzzles must be a task fraught with anxiety. If they’re too easy the game will be ridiculed as trivial, too difficult and it’ll be derided as an exercise in frustration. Limbo probably errs toward the latter.
While there are some very cool and clever puzzles a handful can stop the game dead in its tracks. On at least three occasions, I discovered the solution to a puzzle entirely by accident – running back and forth across an area until something triggered. Limbo simply lacks enough cues to let you know how different things work and what you should to be interacting with.
In many ways, the game is a classic side-scroller harking back to the frustrations of yesteryear by requiring extensive trial and error. You’ll often die to things that you have no way of knowing are there until they kill you. The same goes for multiple-step puzzles. For both, the lesson will cost you your life: Die and remember what to do next time.
There are two things that ease the pain. The first is that the checkpoints are evenly distributed and the loading times aren't too bad. The second is the death animations. Some these are extremely funny and well animated, others are horrifyingly dark, disturbing and violent – especially when you pause to consider that this is all happening to a child.
Indeed it’s Limbo’s award-winning art direction that really stands out: It’s a hauntingly beautiful game. The world of Limbo is all about contrast, the juxtaposition of light and shadow. There is almost no colour to speak of and it makes the place enchanting, creepy and more than a little depressing.
The audio perfectly complements the loneliness of the world. If anything, Limbo is such a grim and sad place, you don't actually want to be there. Against that dark background, the game’s puzzling frustrations can provide you with little reason to stay there and keep experiencing it.
For fans of puzzling games, Limbo can certainly help you with that head-scratching itch. In fact, if you can appreciate a game purely for its artistic visual merits, it’s also definitely worth a look. However, for those with only a passing interest in the genre, Limbo’s difficulty curve, its lack of gameplay direction and its depressed setting could prove a barrier to enjoyment.
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