Boys being protagonists are not an unheard of premise in video games. The games that they are in typically cater to the family, young children or teenagers, so they are not expected to be thrust into situations with outcomes that result in grisly deaths for these minors.
LIMBO appears to break that taboo, if its protagonist can be considered a male minor. LIMBO's protagonist is not shown any clearer on-screen, remaining as a pitch-black silhouette throughout the game. It is through this silhouette that the player will watch the various deaths that the nameless boy can suffer.
That is one of LIMBO's most divergent designs, and perhaps the one that may turn off the more easily offended. To others, the unabashed violence inflicted on the protagonist whenever the player makes a mistake would be refreshing, if such players happen to be rather jaded and are looking for something very different, even if it is something dreadful.
Aside from that, there is LIMBO's artstyle, which is actually the first aspect of the game that the player encounters. It opts for a visual presentation that is composed of silhouettes and virtually nothing else. A sceptical player would suspect that it may lead to some visual problems and/or that it hides deficiencies with the graphics, but most – but not all – of such suspicions would turn out to be untrue. There will be more elaboration on this later.
First impressions aside, the game appears to have next to no semblance of a story. While the documentation and promotional materials of the game describe the story as a boy's quest to find his missing sister, the player is not told of this at all by the game itself.
The game starts with the boy lying down on the ground of a rather poorly lit word, washed out of any colour; even light sources cannot provide anything beyond grayscale. The player is not given any instruction on what to do; as long as the player does nothing, the boy remains motionless.
When annoyance eventually provokes the player into mashing on buttons in the hope of eliciting some response from the game, the boy stirs. Through mashing on some more buttons, the player discovers that the boy responds to the directional control inputs and at least one button compels him to jump. Again, there is virtually no on-screen instruction given by the game for any of such actions.
Such a lack of hand-holding, even a lack of contextual hints, would not be appreciated by those who prefer not to waste time fumbling around to figure out the controls. Furthermore, the controls cannot be customized, at least not without messing with the game files. On the other hand, there are very few control inputs to be learned, as a player would learn if he/she had bothered to examine the controls that the game uses (as a wise player should), which is otherwise adequately documented.
The game also resorts to subtle hints to introduce the use of these controls. As mentioned earlier, the game starts the boy off seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and the player would have little else to do with him other than to have him walk to the left or to the right. Eventually, the player character will encounter a low obstacle that have to be hopped over, and after that, a log that can be pushed or pulled around. For the last case, the game implements a minor mechanic oriented around a visual cue, which acts as a hint that something can be performed on a nearby object.
What this visual cue is will soon be apparent to the player. Having the object in front of the boy causes him to raise his arms, a sight that informs the player that he can push or pull said object around. Again, there is no instruction for this, so the player is left to figure out which of the remaining control inputs would perform said action.
Of course, if the player had bothered to look at the controls options of the game, which are provided as is appropriate for a game product, he/she would figure out which input that is quite quickly.
From here on, the player will find that most of the puzzles in the game can be solved by having the boy jump, run and push/pull things. Much of the challenge would be in timing these actions, and learning said timing involves a lot of trial-and-error.
Any error tends to result in the boy simply dying, it has to be mentioned. There are plenty ways for the boy to die, and they often involve hazards associated with the obstacles/puzzles that the player is trying to overcome.
Some hazards are usually more apparent, such as rotating saws and rolling boulders. The others are not so obvious, especially if the player has been suspending his/her sense of logic (which may occur if one considers the visual themes with disbelief). For example, the player will figure out the hard way that having the boy hit his head against something, either by having his head slamming onto said something, or said something slamming into his head, at moderate to high speeds kills him instantly; this is one of the less obvious hazards.
Such discoveries can be unpleasant, and they certainly do add to the frustration of the gameplay. On the other hand, the game has no requirements whatsoever that insist that the player keep deaths to the minimum. More importantly, the game is rather generous with the distribution of checkpoints. These compensating designs help mitigate the tedium of the trial-and-error gameplay.
Furthermore, the game's very liberal placements of checkpoints do allow for some entertaining shenanigans on the part of the player (and at the expense of the well-being of the fictional boy protagonist). A curious player may derive some amusement from experimenting with the surroundings, looking for ways to cause the boy's death. This is because just about every distinct type of hazard results in a distinct set of death animations, and the boy is rather fragile.
To cite some examples, saws cut apart the boy, boulders smash him so hard that he splits into pieces and industrial crushers immediately pulverizes him into splashes of blood. He is also completely incapable of swimming, drowning in shallow water as soon as it reaches above half of his head.
Much of the violent imagery is masked by the game's black-and-white visuals and silhouetting, of course. This can pose a visual problem to the player; if the boy's sprite is in pieces, the player would learn that this means that he has certainly perished, yet it is not immediately clear whether he is dead or not when something happened to him if his sprite is still in one piece. Fortunately, the game designers do realize this and compensates visually by giving the boy illuminated eyes, which will remain lit until he dies.
(In fact, the boy is the only character with lit eyes.)
An observant player may eventually notice that the boy's many deaths are presented through the splitting of his sprite into its constituent parts, with sprays of blood for embellishment. For other games that use sprites composed of separately animated parts, this "explosion" of sprites into their components would have seemed very contrived, but LIMBO has the excuse of resorting to black-and-white silhouettes for its visual themes, which mitigate the cheesiness of such visual techniques.
Speaking of sprites, all characters and moving objects in the game are presented with similarly designed sprites: all of their sprites are composed of discretely animated parts. This can result in strange-looking motions when the constraints on the movement of these parts fail, but then again, the game's visual designs hide these from all but the most discerning players.
Of course, visuals alone do not make for an overall good game (though it has to be emphasized here that very few, if any, other games have used such visual designs for their entirety). The puzzle-platforming gameplay aspect of LIMBO is fortunately quite competent, but not satisfying, though this is not due to mistakes in puzzle designs on the part of the developers.
Firstly, the consequences of the game's visual designs on its gameplay have to be mentioned. The game's lack of color means that it has to resort to visual tricks to differentiate between objects that cannot be interacted with and those that can. For example, objects in the foreground are shaded darker than objects in the background, which usually cannot be interacted with; the player will soon associate such visual presentations with this gameplay design.
However, some objects in the background can be interacted with, namely machines with switches that the boy can use (and thus will reach out for with his hands if he is close enough). The player is not informed of this in any way; instead, he/she is expected to stumble on this design. However, the game does make it easy for the player to stumble on this design the first time around. Usually, it does this through hemming the boy into an area with little hazards, with seemingly nothing around other than said object to interact with.
In fact, the game resorts to such level designs to introduce new environmental objects that would later make up more complicated puzzles. This may seem a bit cheesy, but considering that the game lacks any textual notifications or any voice-overs, this is much needed.
It is worth noting here that the puzzles rarely seem to repeat; while they do pose the usual problems, e.g. a hazard or obstacle blocking the player character's progress, the solutions are rarely designed to be similar. Of course, they ultimately have the goal of removing or stalling said hazard or obstacle, but the solutions can range from the simple to the rather novel.
As elaboration, there are puzzles that merely require the player character to perform actions in a sequence, perhaps with a bit of timing and legwork, e.g. pulling/pushing a sequence of levers and heaving boxes around. Others require the player to exploit the game's physics, e.g. preserving the momentum of a box being hauled through the air by mashing away at a switch that controls the direction of gravity.
It would be difficult indeed for a player to have an impression that the puzzles are tedious and too unsatisfactorily simple. On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, many of these puzzles require trial-and-error on the part of the player, who may discover that there are many mistakes that could be made and cause the boy to die a terrible death.
These puzzles and hazards happen to be associated with the themes of the levels that the player will go through. The first few levels are set in a rather oppressive and dark forest, which also happens to have rather deadly denizens who have no qualms killing the unarmed and generally defenceless player character (though there are plenty of scenarios to have them getting their very fatal comeuppance). The later ones include what appear to be an abandoned city with malfunctioning signs that double as electrical hazards and mouldering, crumbling edifices, to name a few without stating too many spoilers.
These levels appear to be set one after the other in a sequential manner. That they appear to load seamlessly into the game without any loading screens whatsoever is refreshingly different from so many contemporary games that resort to intermissions to hide loading processes. Of course, one can say that the game's use of completely black 2-D sprites, flat layers for background and foreground art and a grayscale palette simplified the technical make-up of the game a lot, but this is actually a commendable achievement as such processing efficiency is to be expected when the game's visuals look this simple.
That is not to say that the game looks typically dull when it is all black-and-white. Apparently aware that resorting to a grayscale palette and silhouetes for the graphical designs may result in a boring-looking game, the developers have implemented light sources and lighting effects in the game.
Granted, the game cannot make use of these to generate believable shadows as everything already looks so shadowy and silhouetted, but they are used to introduce contrasts in the visuals of the game. In addition to the boy's aforementioned glowing eyes, there are other things that glow, either as a warning to the player (a warning usually learned the hard way, i.e. through at least one death of the boy) or as a highlight. An example of the latter case is the strange glowing eggs that are hidden in difficult-to-reach nooks and crannies of levels, and which serve the minor mechanic of achievements.
The more artistically inclined of players may find that there may be some profound symbolism to be gleaned from the thematic designs of LIMBO. Much of the speculation would concern the game's take on the afterlife and the travails of real life, as suggested and/or hinted at by the game designers, but this is of course just a way to prolong the longevity of the game by having fans talking about its artistic merits. However, if this is indeed one of the game's goals, then it has certainly achieved it rather well.
The game doesn't seem to have much to offer in terms of sound designs. There is not any legible voice-acting whatsoever, the boy and the other characters that appear human are mute and even the more monstrous of characters do not make a single utterance that can be considered as an attempt at vocalizing.
The music is also rather sparse. There may be a track or two to be heard, such as the one in the main menu, but they do not seem to have any appreciable melody.
These two lacking facets of the sound designs do not make for a good first impression, but a discerning player would soon notice that such design decisions may have been deliberate. The dearth of voice-acting and music emphasizes the ambient sounds and sound effects, which are ominous and may even seem creepy.
For example, the forest levels are eerily subdued, lacking the sounds that forest fauna typically makes but otherwise containing the other noises typically associated with forests, such as the rustling of leaves and the crunching of dry foliage underfoot.
Another noteworthy mention about the ambient sound designs is that the game plays very foreboding sound clips in dangerous situations, and plays them again when similar situations are repeated. It would not take long for the player to associate them with certain actions that they must have the player character take to avoid death, especially considering the game's emphasis on trial-and-error and the nasty consequences of failing to know what to do in such situations.
The game's sound effects are mostly used to portray the consequences of the player's actions – or mistakes. This means that many of them are squelching noises that accompany the rending and crushing of flesh that occurs when the player flubs and has the boy slain. Other than that, the sound effects are used to warn the player of nearby hazards, such as crackling sparks from exposed electrical cables.
The result is that LIMBO has a very oppressive atmosphere, especially when its visuals are considered as well. This also happens to fit the unforgiving (due to the game's tendency to just kill the boy if the player messes up) yet generous (due to the many checkpoints) gameplay.
This review thus far would paint LIMBO in a somewhat positive light, yet it is not about to overlook this game's biggest flaw: it is very short. If a player does not care for the hidden collectibles (or perishables, as the boy certainly doesn't stash them away so much as he just crushes them with his feet), the game only lasts a couple of hours or slightly more. It would be an engrossing couple of hours, but there would be players who do not believe that they have gotten their money's worth.
In conclusion, LIMBO is essentially yet another side-scrolling puzzle platformer, but it has refreshingly different visual and aural styles and themes, in addition to puzzles that are more than adequately different when encountered one after the other. Its very short duration is disappointing, however, and detracts from an otherwise great game.