by Ever eat a good banana? You know, one that tastes great but isn’t too green or too brown? Well, what if after eating that banana and you got to the peel you didn’t stop–you just stuffed the peel in your mouth and kept chewing. Welcome to LIMBO.
I’ve made this pretty clear in the past, but in case you missed it, I hate puzzle games. There’s nothing appealing to me about discovering a set of linear 1’s and 0’s that I must adjust the input/output for in order to proceed to the next set of 1’s and 0’s. I also think that most platformers are non-appealing rubbish with a forced mechanic of bland platform traversing and obligatory monster head-stomping. LIMBO, as it so happens, is a puzzle/platform game… and it is AMAZING. For the first half.
The first swig of LIMBO feels like true and pure exploration of the imagination. It is a set of puzzles that are fresh, simple, non-repetitive and clever. Bear traps, rolling boulders, giant spiders–I never knew what was around each turn and I was eager to see the next challenge. There is never a tutorial and there never needs to be one. The game uses the D-Pad and two buttons and that’s it. The level designs teach the player exactly what they need to know by building up the player’s knowledge piece-by-piece from what they have previously encountered. The last time I played a Puzzle Platformer this good was when I played Another World for the SNES and I was ready to rejoice the profound similarities. That was until I noticed that I was half-way through the game after only spending an hour playing. I decided it was best just to put in another hour and see how the game ended. That was the where the fall of LIMBO began.
It was past the half-way point that I began noticing that I was pushing a lot more boxes around to solve my problems. There were no longer neat little tricks and traps. Instead, they were replaced with platforming and switches. There was a neat bit where you climb on the letters “HOTEL” from a building of the same name, but other than that the environments are dull and uninspiring. At the end when the obligatory gravity-switching box-pushing puzzle was the game’s finale, I realized that the second half of LIMBO was filth; relegated in my mind to Tier 3 at best. Sure it’s “done well,” but it’s as invigorating as game of tic-tac-toe. Clever traps are replaced by giant buzz-saws. Mind-controlling leaches are replaced with bland pit-falls. All personality and uniqueness is completely screened from the second leg of the journey to the point where I think I would’ve had a better time just playing through the first part twice.
There’s little else to say beyond this as it’s not a long game. Not even the game’s “story” can redeem the ending. The boy you play as finally meets with a female shadow who stands up when he runs up from a distance and then the screen goes black. No explanation, no closure, just a heaping pile of “Ask me what it means!” The first half of this game is easily Tier 1. Given the entire compilation of the game’s contents though, it barely nets Tier 2.
I hadn’t realized it until I read this, but I think I’ve realized Limbo disappointed me was for almost the same reason. The first half was fantastical horror, but it gradually becomes mundane puzzle-solving. People never go full-Cthulhu, which is a pity. I think that would have made me enjoy Limbo more. As it is, I totally agree with it being Tier Two.