So I grabbed Limbo on impulse, and I have to say it’s… pretty great, actually. The minimalist graphics, sound, and music create the spooky sense of atmosphere that I’ve read about. It has lots of neat puzzles, mostly with few genuine “ha-ha, you’re dead” moments.
Back up a moment. Limbo’s a side-scrolling puzzler, using shades of grey and parallex scrolling, the latter straight out of games that were blindingly sophisticated a decade or so ago. The minimalism extends to every aspect of the game; you start out as a little dark grey boy lying on the ground; your eyes are bright, Children of the Damned white glowing pin-pricks, and you wake up from the blackened ground in a grey world, a forest with fireflies and gentle ambient sounds. You move relentlessly rightward, solving puzzles with oft-fatal consequences for failure.
There first twitch from “spooky” to “creepy” and “downright horrific” is when you wander across a platform with a girl on it, which collapses to hang her; the graphics mean you can’t tell if it’s a person or a mannequin. I went full into that territory when the way to cross a spike pit was to rip the remaining leg off a giant spider that had been pursuing me, then roll the spider’s hairy body into the pit, bound across, and then stand at the side of a lake until enough apparently possessed children run into it and died for me to walk across the corpses. The puzzle on the other side required me to pull one of the corpses out of the water and dump it onto the trigger for a trap so as not to die.
Even so, it’s a very gentle ramp-up, with a hypnotizing, relaxing quality than leaves the tension slowly rising. Of course, there’s no indication as to how far through I am, so it may be unbearably tense by the time I get through.
What I appreciated was that many of the emotional kicks that come are a result of immersing myself in the game; the ambient effects and music make that easy, and then I’m popped into a different state: the child-figure with a glowing thing on its head running into the water and drowning; the first time I see a child-figure and a teen-figure that are setting or triggering traps aimed at me; the spider that won’t die, relentlessly chasing me after puzzle after puzzle I need to solve at speed. Then the moment is over, and it’s back to relaxing immersion. There’s clever use of the camera, zooming in and out to increase and decrease tension. My assumptions are fucked with—time and time again a tight shot means trouble, then… it doesn’t. And so on.
I haven’t finished it yet, but it already feels like a little masterpiece to me.