Limbo is supposed to be a life-changing game. It's supposed to put the traditional 2D platformer in a new, dark, mysterious place that, ostensibly, the game provides in the vague story of a dead child making his way through a sort of "Hell-lite." Most of all, what it's supposed to do is connect with the player, opening up a new, emotional, cathartic experience that few games have ever accomplished.
Note that I've said "supposed to," because for all of its pretensions, Limbo isn't really any of these things. It's a solid 2D platformer, but it's nothing more than that, and calling it anything more than that would be specious.
Here's my problem with the game, right up front: the visuals are indeed pretty amazing, giving the game an appropriately dour look. There's a slight film grain to the black and white images, and I think what Playdead are trying to evoke here are German expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis. This is certainly the aspect of the game that is the most successful. But the problem with Limbo is two-fold: first, for all of its purported "changing the world of gaming" feints, the gameplay itself is shockingly, almost insultingly derivative. And secondly, and perhaps most damagingly, the lack of any context actually works against this particular game, leaving nothing but a pretty shell and an empty centre.
Games, and especially 2D platformers, don't need to have a ton of context. Indeed, in most cases, the context is playing the game itself. Michael Thomsen gets it wrong again (shocker!) when he says that 3D Mario games are a hollow experience because the "save the princess" narrative isn't what the player participates in any more. That's obvious bullshit, because even when players did participate in that narrative, Mario games have always, always been about the player, and having the player project his/her emotions onto the surreal landscape (and making Mario "dark" with "emotional" themes would probably ruin this and also make for a seriously shitty game, full of Michael Thomsen-approved pretensions. Moving on, though…)
I really wish Limbo was a better game, because I've harped on and on about how developers are too quick to fill in a backstory, leaving nothing up to the imagination. In theory, this should work brilliantly for Limbo, because the setting and the visuals are so evocative. But by slapping the player down in the middle of this beautiful but depressing landscape without providing any context at all, the game has to live or die by the experiences that the player projects onto it. And Limbo, unfortunately, is not capable to handle this for a couple of reasons.
The first problem with this, ironically enough, is the game's main theme: death. I picked up that the boy of the game has probably already died, as has his sister (who he is searching for), but it doesn't excuse the game's handling of death. Early on, the game has some truly haunting visuals – other kids face down in pools of water, other kids who want to hunt you down and kill you, etc. etc. However, in any artistic medium, the death of a child should be handled with the utmost care and respect. The image of a child dying is perhaps one of the most gruesome things on the planet in any context, and the way that Limbo has your avatar getting his head chopped off, or his body impaled with spikes, or his limbs crumpling when he falls – replete with blood gushing out in all directions, in "tasteful" black and white – is so unsavoury and so tawdry that you can't take the game's preponderance with death seriously at all. Not to mention that there is no punishment for killing this boy – you get picked up and get to do it all over again a few seconds later, not more than a few feet where the boy had died earlier. I don't really have a solution for this, other than "not making the game at all," though that's not very helpful, I admit.
Limbo is all about its visuals. I know that the game is going after some sort of gut-level impact, but video games are so inundated with violent images that they're not really offering anything new here: just a different hue of the same kind of nightmare scenario that we see far too often. A game that offers up pure joy, whimsy, or a dream-state are now being looked down upon, and games like Limbo – so called "serious, artistic" games – are being praised purely on the strength of their aesthetics.
I played and reviewed a game called A Boy and His Blob way back in February. Let me say this: Limbo and A Boy and His Blob are pretty much the same goddamn game, but with two major differences: A Boy and His Blob has bright, colourful, Miyazaki-esque hand-drawn art that is absolutely gorgeous to look at, while Limbo has its black and white depressionville that is equally beautiful, though hollow; the theme of ABAHB is friendship and companionship while Limbo is about loss; and ABAHB actually has interesting gameplay, while Limbo is hellaciously boring. Can you guess which game has the higher metacritic score?
I don't want to belabor the point any further, but it bears repeating – apparently, Limbo is a great game because it's depressing and dark and filled with death, while A Boy and His Blob gets forgotten because it had the gumption to be about something joyful. Are reviewers really this fatalistic?
I think it comes down to the same thing that happens with the Oscars, which is that movies are praised based on their seriousness of purpose rather than their actual quality. Which is a shame, because A Boy and His Blob is literally one of the greatest games of this generation, filled as it is with gameplay that is actually interesting, but Limbo continues to score up the accolades because of its "deepness." The game isn't deep, and to some degree I think that's on purpose, but people seem to have run wild with this art style to the detriment of actually talking about what makes an artistic experience in videogames.
OK, I've skirted around talking about Limbo's gameplay for long enough. Here it is: you run from left to right, jump, climb ladders, and solve puzzles. That's it. There are precisely zero groundbreaking new ideas here (well, OK, the brain slugs are kind of neat I guess). Limbo's gameplay is taken straight from the playbook of every 2D platformer ever made, and in some cases, with far diminished results. Those puzzles are occasionally interesting, but they don't get very challenging until near the very end of the game. Most of the time, though, they're extremely simplified "push this box over here" kinds of puzzles that don't have anything to do with the purported "themes" of the game – they're just there to have you have something to do in this world. If the player-centric themes of Mario are the joy of movement, recalling childhood, Limbo's player-centric theme is… tedium?
The pacing is also completely out of whack. The first half of the game is the one with the most interesting locales, the most potentially thought-provoking images, but those give way to a bland, vaguely industrial setting full of buzz saws and magnets and stuff. It's hopelessly incongruous, and the setup of Limbo by its very nature is for this setting to be a whole. Because the second half of the game doesn't instill any sense of anything – not the depression of the first half of the game, not the "well, fuck it, let's have an ice world" mentality of Mario, nothing – it becomes bland platformerville here, with challenges that are completely unrelated to anything else in the game.
Perhaps the best example I can give of this is late in the game when it tasks you with manipulating gravity so that you can walk on the roof and move boxes around. Besides the fact that it's also not very interesting, only offering up one genuinely great puzzle (right at the very end of the game), there's also absolutely no lead up to it. It kind of kills the moody, vague, "take from this what you will" feeling the game seems to want to suggest when there's silly, incongruous and unthoughtful level design right before the conclusion.
I'm being intentionally harsh on Limbo. I actually thought it was OK, and had it been marketed or received for what it is – a just-OK 2D platformer – I wouldn't have as many problems with it. But I refuse to buy into the idea that this is one of the best games ever. It's got a potentially great premise and an interesting aesthetic, but that's it, and all of its pretensions won't convince me otherwise. It's difficult to consider something "great" when its design repeatedly undercuts its aims.