Beautiful, haunting and at times creepy, Limbo is certainly a fun and rewarding experience...for about 20 minutes or so.
For those not in the know, Limbo is the story of a young boy who is...well, in Limbo. That's about it.
Oh don't get me wrong, a search of Limbo's plot on the internet will yield thousands of results. People coming up with their own ideas for why this boy is where he is, why he's there, what's going on etc. It's like you stumbled into the forums for Lost.
Let me save you the trouble, there is no story in Limbo...at all. The only official story tagline ever associated with Limbo is that a young boy is looking for his sister, but even that is never stated directly or shown within the game itself.
The game opens with a picture of a broken ladder connected to what looks like some sort of tree-house, on the ground below you can see a dead body, a body you can only assume is the body of the young boy you play as. From that you can deduce that the boy was playing in his tree-house, the ladder broke and he fell to his death only to awaken in surprise surprise, Limbo.
That's all the game will give you and even that is complete and utter here-say. Is it a tree-house? Is that the boy's body or his sisters? Is it even a body at all or is it just a pile of rocks? Is that the living world or is it Limbo? It's black and white so maybe we're just looking at it FROM Limbo? What is Limbo anyway? Is it a layer of hell like the educated would assume or is this some completely new creation? Sister? What sister? There's chicks in this game? Where does she come in? Or maybe this is just nothing more than a random title screen background with no relevance to the plot whatsoever and who really gives a **** at this point.
The developers stated they intentionally left the story the story open and vague to encourage players to come up with their own interpretation of the story themselves. How very artsy of them wouldn't you say? There's nothing wrong with leaving a story open to interpretation, but there's no story in Limbo to speak of whatsoever so it's pointless to even think about.
Leaving a few plot points open, no problem. But the entire game? That's not artsy, that's just lazy game design. There's no reason to play Limbo and there's no motivation to keep you going from point A to point B.
At this point I would happily spoil the ending for you, but if you've been paying attention you can probably guess that even if I did it wouldn't really matter as like I said, Limbo has no story. Let's just say if you're looking for some sort of pay-off then you can forget it. Boy, can you ever.
As a visual storybook which is really about all this game is then well, Limbo shines. It exudes ambiance at every turn and the graphics, while relatively simple are nothing short of breathtaking. It's also strangely haunting and even downright creepy at times. It's no kiddie game, watching your player get his head chopped off or crushed to death or ground up into bite size bits makes sure of that. The physics and player controls are also for the most part solid, though a few occasional hiccups with controls are an issue it's not too bad. In the controls and graphics department, Limbo is a pretty impressive looking game.
As a "game" though it falls exceedingly short. The puzzles in Limbo won't have anyone scratching their heads for long and if you're looking for replay value then you better start looking elsewhere, as once you finish it there's absolutely zero reason to ever pick it up again. On that subject, you'll also finish it pretty quickly, it's ridiculously short. I clocked in at just under 3 hours on my first and only playthrough and believe me, I wasn't rushing. A speed runner could probably finish this game in under an hour.
Towards the end of the game though it takes off the kid gloves and decides to well, screw with you. You'll be assaulted with cheap death after cheap death and it comes out of nowhere.
It's akin to the really crappy pIatformers of yesterday, the kind where you'd be standing on the edge of a platform and have no idea what was below you until you jumped down, be it death or another out of view platform. That was bad game design then and surprise, it's bad game design now. Limbo does almost the exact same thing and it does it more than once. Basically they ran out of ideas at some point and thought it would be fun to screw with you a little to up the games running time. A few of the later puzzles won't even make sense until you voluntarily kill yourself to see how it's supposed to work. Consider the fact that there's an achievement for not dying during a playthrough and that just screams half arsed replay value to me.
Limbo isn't a "bad" game, the fact that an indie studio developed a game of this level of quality is impressive to say the least. But if you want serious platforming and challenging puzzles then obviously, go elsewhere.
On the other hand, for the casual crowd who isn't concerned with challenge or who just want to play a visually striking, laid back kind of game (well, as laid back as giant spiders and gruesome death scenes get) then maybe Limbo is what you're looking for.
Keep in mind though: 10$ for 1-4 hours of gameplay?
Only the most desperate of gamers would ever call something like that a deal.