Limbo – Review

Platform Reviewed from: 360

If fans of Portal and Braid took offence to the notion that a game’s duration should ever be used as a partial definition of its worth, then Limbo represents their closing statement. Sitting confidently at roughly three hours in length, developer Playdead’s first project leaves a striking impression of craftsmanship and design, at the ultimate cost of length and replayability. There is no filler here, and in a month that saw a return to the extremity of a Crackdown object collection marathon, Limbo stands as the absolute antithesis of that overused schematic.

Within those short few hours, its Danish development team has carried off something rather special. To be reductive, this is a simplistic platformer with only two buttons to worry about: one for jump, and one for grab. Bound by the confines of those actions, a succession of physics-based puzzles play out across 20+ chapters that transition through urban, industrial and rural scenery; and though the world is a cohesive single entity, challenges are neatly sectioned off to avoid confusion. Back-tracking is minimal.

In practical terms, it’s all ropes, crates, floor buttons and switches; but implemented with real flare. In isolation, most of the conundrums are logically solved, but thanks to some clever visual misdirection and a willingness to play with the velocity and inertia of objects, each one prompts just enough puzzlement to sustain a satisfying challenge that weaves lateral thinking with traditional gaming skill. If you remember the difficulty curve and pacing of Glados’ test chambers, this is roughly equivalent, with a similar mix of timing and logic.

But as excellent as that core gameplay is, Limbo’s most striking element is undoubtedly its sparse black-and-white visual style that screams arthouse from every soft-focus pore. There is no HUD to be found here, no control overlay or on-screen prompting, and as the resultant interaction with the environment is carried out on a trial-and-error basis, neatly mirroring your lost child avatar. Other children in the world are deadly, giant spiders tower menacingly behind tree stumps or give chase, and the general rule is that if it moves, it’s either very bad or very useful.

To their credit, Playdead certainly hasn’t shied away from making the most of its adult fairytale setting, with the stark contrast of black-on-white making a spectacle of every gruesome environmental death – and there are many. This is a game in which stumbling across a puzzle solution by way of your own decapitation is routine, but it remains a shocking sight every time it happens, even when expected. In comparison to almost every other videogame of the past few years, this presentation of violence feels mature, and perhaps as that sense of maturity stems from visual abstraction, maybe that’s a signal that videogames aren’t quite ready to deal with photorealism just yet.

Regardless to the outcome of that debate, Limbo stands as a fantastic achievement. It might not last as long as an Alan Wake or Silent Hill, but it packs more spine-tingling wonder and horror into its opening hour as those games manage in eight or more. That it comes wrapped around a series of puzzles that can be compared – if only in quality and pacing – to Portal, is justification alone for a purchase. There is definitely something to be said for a tight focus.