Limbo is an independent, single-player puzzle-platformer game available in the Xbox Live Arcade. This is a bit like saying Silent Hill 2 is a wacky Japanese puzzle-adventure game. Yes, I suppose it is - the kind that makes you want to huddle in the corner of your basement in a veritable prison of soul-crushing despair while your character is repeatedly forced into increasingly disturbing situations he has no control over.
In Limbo, you are a little boy in an artistically stylized black and white world where absolutely everything is trying to kill you. Unless you read the backstory, you have no idea who you are or where you are going, only that you must keep moving forward.
The atmosphere in the beginning of the game is fantastically eerie, diffuse with a kind of paralyzing fear that makes you want to drop the controller and curl up in a ball as your character is impaled by a giant spider leg for the eighth time in as many seconds.
This spider will haunt your nightmares. For a game that is completely devoid of color, the violence is surprisingly graphic.
Unfortunately, the more unnerving atmospheric aspects of the game decline as you progress, as the creepy forest is replaced by some sort of urban wasteland and the enemies are replaced by more and more puzzles. Puzzles designed to kill you, no doubt, but gone are the spider legs crawling slowly out of the sides of the screen, just waiting for you to come too close. The game is short, certainly, but I don't think that is it's greatest failing - rather, the loss of atmosphere around halfway through the game really ruins it for me.
The ending is abrupt, but in that sense, it fits well with the beginning. One can only suppose that the girl you see at the end is burying your body, and you have been dead the entire game. Unsurprising, I suppose, for a game called Limbo, but I thought it was a nice touch. Yet I got the distinct feeling that the developers were either getting bored or lazy during the last half of the game - parts of it feel like they are needlessly trying to extend it through extensively complicated puzzles. At the point the anti-gravity fields started to show up, it just seemed like they were grasping at straws. Beautiful art style aside, the last half of the game didn't really have enough substance to keep me riveted to the screen, nor was it worth the full 1200 Microsoft Points, which is a shame - the first two hours were fantastic.
And now for something completely different.
