Saturday 16 July 2016

Limbo

Appropriately named for the wrong reason.

This is stylistic/minimalistic(?) black and white puzzle platformer is pretty nifty and despite being on the short side of things has some good head scratching sections, especially if you are aiming to get all the extra easter eggs. For something that doesn't use any text or speech, it starts out pretty decent at teaching the player of their limitations and what things are fatal to your character: pretty much everything. :P

It also does a great job of imbuing dread and fear in the earlier stages, something that is unfortunately lost as you progress where things begin relying more on either prior knowledge or excellent gamer ability. The achievement of making it through with less than five deaths is almost certainly unattainable for a first time player as that method of teaching then practice quickly evaporates later on.

Pretty cool for something just in shades of gray.

I feel that the best bits of it are at the beginning. For some reason it seems to have the most care taken design wise. Towards the end when you are avoiding laser guided bullets and playing with gravity altering buttons it feels more and more like a slower Super Meat Boy experience. Doesn't help that the final bit required me to switch to windowed mode to avoid a game breaking crash and that the actual end is quite sudden. I guess much like the title, it's own spirit was lost in Limbo. Still a fun game but not a great game in my book, and it easily could have been. I give it three terrifying giant spiders out of five.

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