We Support an R18+ game Classification

These days it seems the only safe place left for originality in videogames lies with the independent and downloadable ‘arcade’ market. A place where poor sales are acceptable, where a lower price tag invites a more relaxed and less scrutinizing audience and sleeper hits are far more common. Cheap, pick-up-and-play games like Braid and Flower are widely regarded as the best in their genre - a genre that, in its infant state, has become a melting pot of genres themselves - because they cleverly combine an expected level of gameplay with a little something more. Emotion.

Enter Limbo, a game that continues this impressive concept of serving up bite-sized satisfaction and leaves you feeling as if you’ve just watched a foreign art-house film that you could chat about over a coffee.

Limbo starts out simple enough. Reminisce of a silent, Polish film, its striking white on black titles and flickering silhouetted imagery illustrate a dark and gruesome experience that will draw you in, but leave you with almost nothing in terms of story. And that’s the ‘genius’ of it.

Limbo, at its core, is a side-scrolling puzzle game not all that dissimilar to Braid. But where Braid cleverly twists and bends time, Limbo takes a decidedly more simple approach, limiting itself to playing with gravity. You’ll guide your character, one that looks eerily like A. A. Milne’s Christopher Robin, from left to right outunning monsters, pulling levers, playing with graviy and momentum and evading more and more complex environmental nasties, toward a welcome and neatly wrapped up ending.

Limbo’s brilliant level design uses contrast to draw your eye, quite often leading you intro a trap while your eye wanders toward the welcoming light. Its invisible and continuous level structure could be blamed for its staccato length as you’re never quite sure where a level starts or finishes and before long you’re sitting back in your lounge trying to formulate your own theories on what just happened.

Like fish in a barrel, the independent and downloadable ‘arcade’ market seems to be an easy one to rise to the top of. Full release titles could afford to benefit from the same breathing room that games like Braid, Flower and their newest sibling Limbo have enjoyed. Until then, get your kicks for twenty bucks knowing that it’s well worth the spend.