Well, the Summer of Arcade is upon us, and the first of five titles to be released is out: Limbo, a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer of sorts. It’s a very simple game; there are no items to collect, and the controls are limited to “move”, “jump”, and “interact”. There’s also no color; the presentation is something like watching shadow puppets on a foggy gray set.
This game is stunning. It’s dark, and haunting, and unnerving, and compelling. There is no spoken dialogue, no music, no words on the screen, and no backstory apart from, “Uncertain of his sister’s fate, a boy enters LIMBO.” Beyond that, there’s just ambient noises, darkness, and the hostile world constantly trying to kill you.
And kill you it will; death is everywhere. I can’t really say the game is “graphic” or “gory”, because black shadows can’t be all that lurid. Still, the subject matter is mighty grim, as are solutions to a few puzzles, and somehow the darkness gives the proceedings a certain gravity that it wouldn’t have in color.
The leading theory on the game’s “story”, as it is, seems to be:the boy and his sister are dead or dying as the result of a car wreck. In the top right corner of the menu screen is an object that appears to be a car. At the end of the game, the boy crashes through glass, which may be a dying recollection of being ejected through the windshield. Some have suggested that, in the two glimpses we get of his sister, she appears to be performing CPR, perhaps on the boy. There certainly is a dying-dream-like quality to the game.
Anyone else played it? What did you think?
)
