During the late 00s Indie Game Boom, there seemed to be a game for every type. You had Spelunky, the old-school rogue-like, rebirthing a genre long hidden from mass appeal into a best seller; Super Meat Boy, which turned classic platforming into a hard-as-nails gauntlet like how the NES days are fondly remembered, but with a modern control scheme that improved on them; Castle Crashers, as the proud bastion of the flash games that preceded the Indie Game Boom, but were just as paramount to its success; and Braid, the artistically leaning take that lead to new popular discussion on the medium and created a modern auteur out of indie developers. Nestled amongst the others is probably a game you've heard of more, or at least just as much: Limbo was always the stylish one. Taking after cinematic platformers and the subtlety of ICO, Limbo burst on to the scene underneath a shower of awards for design, presentation, and general appreciation. Despite this, of all the games I've listed here, it was the hardest for me to get into. It is nothing against the game, specifically, but more because Limbo is made for a relatively niche audience (not so niche as to avoid wild success, but niche in what is required to fully appreciate it). I'm still not sure cinematic platformers are exactly my thing, but that doesn't mean a standout can't grab me and shake me to a tizzy.
Limbo, which has been aped to the point of annoyance (see my review of Little Nightmares for more on the subject), stood out among the crowd at the time for having the artistic flare so pined after in gaming journalism at the time without the pretension of Braid. Limbo didn't ask you to drop the veil in order to appreciate it, to contemplate games and their purpose, their bias, and the horrors of man (well, mostly). Instead it worked on impressions, emotions stretched taught and plucked to a melancholic melody. It wasn't about anything, it was all feeling, all the way through. Some of its stylistic choices, such as its surprisingly graphic violence and incredibly dark images, have become commonplace today, but at the time rarely had such maturity been given to grotesque images. Usually, they were relegated to cheap thrills and cathartic amusement. Limbo did something different, hoping you wouldn't take the images on screen as sensationalism, but as something weighty, that they would sink into you in a way that would linger, and largely it succeeded. Children maneuver in shadow, like Lord of the Flies characters penetrated by the wild world around them. Giant spiders interrogate and hunger, creating obstacles that must be outsmarted. The impression you get is that of children playing turned toward horror, where the longing and the imagination has run away from them, and the horror and the oppressive state of the universe begins to take its toll. You, a lone boy with a simple mission not immediately apparent to you, traverse it with bravery, a shadow among shadows, the difference between you and your adversaries the whites of your eyes, a symbol of sight others cannot see. The world is dark and full of the awful, the writhing, and the cruel, but those whites see a clarity through the haze, much like the shafts of light that break through the unseen canopy above.
It's effect, much like its gameplay, has somewhat dated. As I said, some of its execution is pretty normal now, and its simple control scheme of jump, walk, and grab are so definite to the cinematic platformer and ICO-likes as to be veritable axioms of the genre. The puzzles will vary in effectiveness depending on how familiar you are with the genre. At this point, I am so familiar that the game played like one continuous flow until its final third, like an interactive film of early animation when they were made with silhouetted paper cutouts.
The grainy, 8mm styled filter enhances the feeling of dread and foreboding, as does the ambient soundtrack. I'd be hesitant to call the game progressive on its effective and all encompassing style, rather I would call it influential. It reaches a platonic form of what would come over the last ten or so years, being the precise kernel that all else would build on top of. Surprisingly, despite some caveats where you have to remember this did it first or at least so at the onset of indie games blowing up, the game holds up incredibly well for its simplicity. The game is by no means perfect, especially a few puzzles towards the end that ask you to play with the physics in a way that feels like you are cheating it rather than following coded direction, but it stands effectively in contrast to those who came after it. If I had one big complaint about the game, it would be that the ending fakes you out of something magnificent. The end pulls a trick, one that I was left floored by, but immediately twists, makes a pivot to something you'd consider more traditional. Perfection was missed, meaning evaporated back into its vaporic state of emotional impression, and still we have a game that stands tall, but not quite as tall as it could have.
9.0
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