As much mood piece as video game, but the mix of stark atmosphere and clever puzzles is hard to resist.
At its heart, Limbo is a puzzle game: you interact with the environment and overcome obstacles while trying to avoid an untimely (and messy) death...but you'll die a lot anyway. Learning to find the dangers cleverly concealed in the game's shadows keeps you aware of your simplistic surroundings, and draws focus to the minute details of the landscape. Limbo presents it's fair share of platforming and precision button pressing as well, but unlike, say, Mega Man, you're never forced to start back at the beginning of a stage. Any frustration you might feel at an inopportune death melts away when you respawn right next to where you failed. And when you finally figure out the solution to open the path forward, you feel like you've accomplished something. Limbo is not a game that gives up its secrets through mere trial-and-error -- its puzzles demand thought and contemplation.
But the further you progress through the game, the less puzzle-like, and the more "Mega Man" things become. The game's opening moments place you in an alien world, with spot-on musical cues and shadowy creatures that compel you forward. But these antagonists disappear after those opening acts with no explanation. This tattered trace of civilization and the chance of meeting someone who could offer some explanation for this bizarre world are replaced by industrial levels full of crates and spinning blades. While that makes for deviously fun puzzles, it also detracts from what Limbo should be able to handle easily: the narrative.
And that's my biggest problem with the game: Everything is out to kill you, and you don't know why. If you didn't read the game's product description before jumping in, you'd have no idea that you were scouring Limbo in search of your lost sister. But why do you come back to life after every horrific death? Why are you able to flick a switch and walk along the ceiling? The further you delve into Limbo, the more the mechanics seem built to satisfy increasingly abstract puzzles, rather than providing you a real impetus to explore.
The game's haunting world promises a deeper meaning, a richer narrative, than it delivers. It isn't missing dialogue or some pretentious wall of text at the end -- Limbo proves in its opening moments that it can tell volumes without using any words at all. But the disparate pieces of this otherwise intricately crafted puzzle never form a cohesive whole. Still, while it stumbles to pull everything together, Limbo is short and certainly worth experiencing, if for nothing else, than to see this beautiful, two-tone world yourself