Review: ‘LIMBO’ is all killer, no filler
Seriously, spiders are the least of your problems.
I'm fully aware that STARCRAFT II debuted Tuesday at 12:01 a.m. EDT, and I'm enjoying this singular, momentous, 12-years-in-the-making achievement as much as anybody. If I could have played hooky Tuesday and Wednesday to run all the way through the game's incredible single-player campaign, I'd be writing that up for today.
But at my yeoman's pace, that will take a week or more.
Thank the maker, then, for remarkable, bite-sized adventures like Danish developer PlayDead Studio's LIMBO, a moody platformer released last week on Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade.
Worlds apart from the canonical baggage that shapes franchises like StarCraft, the only narrative context you'll find in LIMBO exists entirely outside the game itself.
As Wikipedia's curators have it, you control a boy in pursuit of his missing sister.
And ... that's it.
The game's description on Xbox Live is similarly vague, and PlayDead has shown no interest in elaborating on any of it.
That's just as well. Not knowing who you are, where you are or why you're there makes a strange sort of sense in this quiet, brutal world, where spiders are as big as houses and up is often down.
Put another way, LIMBO isn't about hit points or water physics or some densely woven narrative. It's about the purity of the platforming experience, and by that metric, it performs like a champ.
As the game starts, you're coming to your senses in a dense parallax forest. The camera eases into focus for what feels like forever -- your avatar takes more than a minute to sit up, open two lamp-like eyes and climb to his feet.
This whole sequence is a joy to watch.
Eventually, you'll realize the game has relinquished control to you, and your inborn gaming vocabulary tells you to run right. You'll clamber up a small hill, instinctively jump off an enormous log and immediately fall to your death.
Then you'll respawn, start over and get it right.
This will happen to you dozens of times -- maybe a hundred or more. You'll drown, electrocute yourself, alert automatic turrets and get skewered by the aforementioned spiders.
The game's gorgeous, occasionally devilish aesthetic is partly to blame for your haplessness. Your character (and the other ten or so living creatures that populate LIMBO) are drawn only in sillhouette, and the entire game is rendered in black, white and a thousand handsome shades of gray.
So you'd be forgiven for glancing past that narrow strip of spikes that closes around your tiny legs the moment you disturb it. Or the tiny natives who attack you with blowguns on sight. Or the gravity-suspending switch that will keep you from plummeting to your doom.
PlayDead calls this "trial by death," and though it occasionally bummed me out -- I grew attached to my nameless, voiceless hero, and watching this world vivisect him over and over again was unsettling -- it works well enough.
Some of the puzzles might seem inapproachable at first, but most of them give away their secrets as soon as they slaughter you.
If you work at my pace, you'll clear the game in a little under three hours. Then, unless you're fishing for a few fantastic achievements or salivating for a second go, your time with LIMBO is regretfully finished. Like "The Empire Strikes Back," it's the sort of thing you wish you could forget, if only so that you could experience it for the first time all over again.
So, yes. It's short. I hesitate to mention all of that that in the same breath as the game's pricetag, as nearly every writer in the gaming press has managed to do. Yeah, the going rate for Xbox Live Arcade games this summer is $15, and no, LIMBO doesn't buck that trend.
But when an interactive moment is as fun and thoughtfully crafted as this one is, $15 is a bargain. If even the Practice League in StarCraft II is handing your dignity to you on a digital platter, consider LIMBO.
This article originally appeared in the York Dispatch.