LIMBO

 **Be sure to check out the video review!** 

Today I take you on a trip into the dark world of Limbo, where shadowy human figures flee your every step, giant spiders seek your death, and color is a thing of dreams.

Now that fits in nicely.

Limbo is a fairly recent platform/puzzle/action game. There is no story, but the desire to find what lies just to the right of the screen drives you ever onward. That, and things like giant spiders that want nothing more than to impale the small boy protagonist on one of their spindle like legs.

The puzzles, or levels if you will, are pretty good, and the game flows seamlessly from one to the next.  At first your most difficult task will be things like trying to figure out how to cross a lake, run away from a boulder that is coming to crush you Indiana Jones style, or take on a spider with very sharp legs. Later you progress from the forest to more industrial areas, and the dangers shift to mine carts on electrified rails, machine guns, and changes in gravity that will fling you so hard against a wall, you'll become a pancake. While everything does scale in difficulty very well, I'll admit to being stuck once or twice and having to look around for a hint to get me beyond my predicament, usually finding out I had the right idea, but hadn't pushed that platform far enough, or jumped too soon, etc.

Gruesome death is part of the game. The black blob is the protagonist's head.

While the gameplay is good, and a fun way to spend some time, it isn't the best part of the game. Rather, it's the atmosphere of the game, the combination of visuals, background sound, lighting, etc, where this game really shines though. You almost need to play through the game a second time with that it mind, and just take some time, when you're not dodging machine guns or trying to outrun rising flood waters, and just consider what is going on around you. Creeping through the woods you'll notice the grass swishing as you walk through it, trees and other things start to blur the further away from them you get, the whisper of the wind overshadowed by the impact of your feet, which brings up a little puff of dust. Or in the, I shall call them sewers, the roar of falling water, or the occasional drip of just a little bit, or the ripples as you move through a particularly wet area. My favorite though is in the city, out on some roofs where you can hear the pitter patter of rain falling on glass and sheet metal. There is no background music or vocals in the game to distract from the environment, just the occasional noise an enemy or item makes.

There really are only two downsides to this game. The first is that it is a short game, and all in all it will probably have taken me longer to prepare this review than it took to play the game, clocking in at just under 3 hours. The other has to do with controls, and that's because the game uses the arrow keys and Ctrl, with no option to reassigning them besides, I hear, going in and editing some text files. Or you could use a gamepad. Nothing major with those, and the game does play fine with the keyboard, but I would have been more comfortable with WASD, and sometimes it's the small things that make a big difference.

You might notice the lighting, blur on the edge, and so forth, if it weren't for the big spider with a corpse on it's leg entering screen left.

Normally the game is $10, but it has been on sale a few times for as low as $2.50. At that price you should jump on it, but don't feel bad about spending $5 either. In the end, I'd say the gameplay is a 7. It is good, but not great, and the game is short. The artistic direction however, is a solid 10, and from that aspect of it I can't think of another game I've played that comes close.  So I think I'll just average them out, and then round up for the convenience of a solid number, and to support some indie guys, which makes this game a 9 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Score: 9/10

Suggested Price: $5, has been lower