Heavenly Purgatory

When I heard of it, I predicted that LIMBO would be the next Braid; and boy, I wasn't wrong. An Xbox Live Arcade title, a 2D-platformer, with a striking art style and brains behind its deceptively simple concept: LIMBO's similarities with the much hallowed time-bending paint-rendered XBLA platformer are plenty . And much like Braid, LIMBO has been getting rave reviews - a moody, creative platformer with wonderful atmosphere and ingenious, often cruel, environmental puzzles. That about sums it up. LIMBO, like Braid, is a masterpiece.

With a minimal, close-to-nonexistent plot, LIMBO opens amidst confusion and fear - a small boy, with glowing white eyes his only distinguishable feature, awakes in the middle of a dark forest. The game is rendered completely black and white, with yourself controlling only the silhouette of the unfortunate boy. What happens next is a series of events that unravels at a leisurely pace. Most of these series of events are... you dying.

As well as a land where everyone still uses levers as their main form of switching things on and off; LIMBO paints the picture of a world in which everything is out to kill, eat, crush, stab, impale, implode, and deface you. It is a world in which not one creature, animal or man, is your friend. This fact, combined with the atmospheric visuals and creepy ambiance (devoid of a score), creates an experience quite unlike any you've probably ever experienced. I've been playing a lot of horror first person shooters: Condemned, FEAR2, STALKER: Clear Sky, Dead Space. And none of them even came CLOSE to the amount of times LIMBO made me jump out of my skin and onto the floor. I guarantee at least five deaths will be unexpected and horrific. One may make you yelp out loud. Some may even make you laugh nervously as your faceless avatar gets wrapped up and swallowed whole by a large, large arachnid. Graphic, gory, evil beyond measure; simply put, LIMBO would pass as a perfectly executed survival-horror game. And it would probably still be the best damn horror game of the year.

Gameplay is basic fare, if you wash off the darkness and grittiness. The atmosphere is a good 80% of the goodness of LIMBO. Y'know what? That's fine! Strip away the paint and it's just a basic old platformer with occasional ultra-violent spike traps. I mean, strip away the paint of most open-world sandbox games, and aren't they all just GTA3? Aren't most first-person shooters Halo, CoD? DOOM? It doesn't mattter. What does matter is that a lot of work went into all of LIMBO - just obviously not the ending. It's like Playdead Studios realized they had something immensely special on their hands, so they concentrated on making the whole experience as special and as polished as possible. And so the difficulty and tension curve is a bit wonky - there's plenty of tension, but no real release (as a whole), even though each sub-section has its own heart-beating moments followed by a welcome sigh of relief. It's almost unforgivable, but LIMBO is such a unique experience it's hard to care. It's 3-5 hour length may turn off potential buyers, mind.

So, should you buy LIMBO? Is it worth AUD$16.50? If you shell out for 2000 Microsoft Points, getting ahold of LIMBO and a few other XBLA goodies is well justified. And probably LIMBO on its own is well worth the cash. Not since Braid has the XBLA had such an exciting, inventive, artistic title on its hand, and this is well on its way to becoming the XBLA Game of the Year; if not the Indie Game of the Year (I'm holding out for Super Meat Boy though). There is no reason those with the moolah shouldn't purchase and experience LIMBO for themselves. Skip the demo, just get straight into it and witness the finest example of quality over quantity in recent times.

Just don't hope you'll get reincarnated in colour.