Limbo Review

In 1929 Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali collaborated on a short film called Un Chien Andalou. It had no story, but was rather a collection of surreal images with only the slightest trace of narrative thread (it also started out with a man slicing open a woman’s eyeball with a razor). Limbo, the first game by Danish developer, Playdead, is Un Chien Anadalou’s videogame equivalent. While the game description on XBLA tells us it’s about a boy looking for his sister, that’s never made explicit in the actual game. Limbo is really about moving a boy from left to right on a 2D plane through one horror-filled machination after another. If this sounds appealing to you, you’ll probably find a lot to like about Limbo. Just don’t be surprised when it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The most striking thing about Limbo is its unique black and white aesthetic. Employing silhouetted foregrounds with hazy, out-of-focus grey backgrounds and a heavy dose of jittery film grain, Limbo looks like something you may have dreamt after a night of watching The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari followed by a round of Mario. With the playspace generally fading to black along the edges and little in focus, it makes exploring the deadly world of Limbo all the more imposing. It’s bold, striking, and in a medium that spoils us with new images, Limbo has what it takes to stand apart at the top of the pack.

More surprising is how Limbo sounds. Best played with headphones, Limbo’s aural palette is filled with nature sounds like rain drops, wind, twigs breaking, etc… The music is subtle enough that it blends in gracefully with the natural sounds and you often won’t notice it’s even playing until a particularly dramatic moment.

The actual game design is simple but clever, consisting of environmental puzzles and tricky platforming challenges. The controls are as minimalist as can be, with the “how to play” screen consisting only of buttons for “jump” and “use.” The puzzles grow in complexity, with switches for changing water elevation levels to mind-controlling parasites allowing you to only move in one direction, eventually leading to zero gravity machines. The game is very good about not recycling content, so every puzzle stands out on its own. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but it’s all consistently polished without a single unfair solution in the bunch.

The platforming side relies far more on trial and error, but sensible checkpointing and short reloads make it rarely frustrating. In fact, dying is often its own reward with some spectacularly gruesome death animations adding lots of menace to the proceedings.

Atmosphere is paramount to Limbo’s success and it’s here where it excels. There’d be times when I’d delve deeper and deeper into a new area as the lighting grew dim and the music became increasingly brooding and oppressive. After solving a few puzzles and performing a handful of death-defying feats, the reward would be a brightly lit area full of butterflies and punctuated by more uplifting melodies. The key to Limbo is how much it shifts the player’s mood without doing anything overt. It’s the deliberately paced sense of dread and relief that makes Limbo’s scant three hour running time feel as epic as most games quadruple its length.