Lost in Limbo

Warning: there be spoilers ahead

Let me first say this: if you have any sort of passion for interactive entertainment and its capacity for art, Limbo is something you absolutely must experience. Without a doubt, it makes its way onto my list of top 10 XBLA games; let's say slide it in to that 5th spot ahead of Geometry Wars 2 and behind Castle Crashers. While that's a great compliment to the game and speaks volumes about how much I loved it, it could have easily made the top 3. At the top of that list you'll find the two games on the XBLA that I find best exemplify gaming as an art form. Portal and Braid both rose to that level by becoming more and more awe inspiring as the game progressed. They both established themselves as games early and through brilliantly establishing game mechanics early and then using those mechanics to elevate the play experience into something meaningful and emotionally complex, those game rose from video game to interactive art as you played them. Where Limbo unfortunately gets it wrong is that it gets it backward. The game starts out as a true art form, but as the experience goes on, it devolves from interactive art to video game.

From here on out, there are going to be ***SPOILERS***, so don't read unless you've played the game. During the first 45 minutes or so of Limbo, it doesn't even feel like a game. It's an interactive experience. Your mind feels like it's completely shut off, but it's not. It's so fully and deeply engaged in the experience that progressing through it feels very organic. And while yes, there are puzzles and there are platforms, you're not exactly conscious of them. You merely move forward past obstacles. The game feels much more like a film than a game because your progress is entirely orchestrated. Each puzzle is so unique and so organic to the situation that you barely even notice that you're solving puzzles. The epitome of this sensation comes when you come to an impassible spike pit and the giant spider that's been haunting you for the past 20 minutes falls down behind you. You immediately fear for your life and jump straight into the spike pit. You of course die, but for that brief moment the idea of trying to bridge that gap seems a much better alternative to facing the spider head-on. Upon respawning (something you will do a lot), you know that this time you'll have to face the spider. This time when it falls, you stop to see if it come at you. When it does not, you slowly approach the beast. As you move closer, the camera pans left to reveal that the spider has only a single leg left. Confident that you've defeated it, you move towards it in triumph, only to be skewered by its last leg. Okay, time for a third try. This time, you move toward it slowly until the leg rears back to strike. When it does so, you quickly jump back to avoid being killed a third time. This time, the leg stays outstretched as the spider clearly hasn't the strength to strike a second time. Your first instinct in this moment of triumph is to jump on the spider's head, and you do so. If the spider is still going to kill you, it would have done so then. Next you try to push the spider into the spike pit to use it as a stepping stone, but it won't budge. Next, you try pulling it there by its leg. It won't budge that way either. But, as you keep tugging, the leg starts to come off. After ripping off its last leg, you are then able to roll the head of the spider into the pit.

What's so awe-inspiring about this sequence is how naturally the puzzle's solution reveals itself to you. At no point do you even feel like you've been presented with a puzzle, this is simply the way that you get across the gap. You feel resourceful. From this point forward, however, the game begins to slowly fall under the weight of its initial ambition. Obstacles begin to feel more and more like puzzles, and the experience slowly and gradually devolves into a game that we've all seen before. It starts with the first time a worm attaches to your head and the only way to remove it is to solve a crate puzzle. That one crate (the first of many) is the first item or set piece that doesn't feel natural. It doesn't feel like you're using part of the environment, it feels like a level designer placed a crate there so you could solve a puzzle. It's out of place, and it's your first moment of disbelief in the world. That first crate is quickly dismissed, however, as the game continues its organic since of wonderment for another 30 minutes or so, until you reach your first water puzzle.

There's a section of the game where you have to flip a couple switches a few times to change water levels and use floating crates to get across a couple of gaps. This is where Limbo stops being a piece of interactive art and becomes nothing more than a puzzle platformer. Granted, it's a very good puzzle platformer, but nothing about it is unexplored territory. Unlike Braid and Portal, Limbo does not have any unique play mechanics. Both of those games begin by introducing you to unique play mechanics of their games and the rules of their worlds, and then use that to spring art at you unexpectedly (yes, I'm aware of how awkward that sentence is). The beginning of Limbo never feels like a tutorial. The experience merely unfolds before you. Each interaction with the environment feels natural. The clear intent of the designers was to never fall back on old puzzles or solutions and to continually challenge the player with new obstacles at every turn. The problem is that from this water puzzle forward, the puzzles are all very clear in your mind. You enter a room, and you are presented with a puzzle. Your thought process is no longer, "how do I keep going?" it's, "how do I solve this puzzle?" It gets even harder to suspend your disbelief and fully immerse yourself as the game goes on because the puzzles become more and more present in your mind. The first time you invert gravity, it becomes very, very clear that this experience which was once art has become nothing more than a video game.

In the end, Limbo was a very frustrating experience. It was on such a great path before it become nothing little more than rehashed switch and crate puzzles. That being said, however, I still whole-heartedly recommend the game. The art style is very unique, the play mechanics are solid, and for the first 45 minutes, you're completely lost in it. And, a lot like I Am Legend, while it's never bad, those first 45 minutes are so spectacular that they make the second half all the more disappointing, but the whole is still worth it for those first 45 minutes where you completely lose yourself in the experience.

--Chilly P

[update] p.s. I've started reading more reviews, and it turns out that I'm not alone.