Trial and error, mostly error

User Rating: 2 | LIMBO PS4

Limbo is an adventure game that was originally out for the Xbox Live marketplace and PC but was ported to the PS4 as well. What starts off as a charming visual spectacle quickly fades into obscurity with ho-hum gameplay, problematic decisions and monotonous sequences. All of this for not very much either.

The game begins in a dark forest with your character vacantly standing in between the trees. Your goal is to navigate your way to civilization in order to find your missing sister. It is, without a doubt, one of the worst plots in existence. I never found myself to be immersed in the game world, and I honestly couldn't care less about what happened to any of the characters that I found, dead or alive. Speaking of characters, you won't find a whole lot of them. The very few you encounter will either attack you or flee in terror. You might even run into some corpses along the way. If I had to praise the game on one thing, it would be the spooky atmosphere. The developers nailed it perfectly with every location that you travel to, whether it'd be the forest, the fields or even the city. Sadly, you probably won't stick around long enough to even see the other environments.

For every puzzle or trap you run into, you'll need to find away around it. It sounds really simple when I put it that way, but playing through it is a real test of endurance to see if you have the time and patience to even sit through another one of them. They all play out horribly, and more often then not will result in countless amounts of stupid deaths, and you have no control over more than half of them. Things like moving objects, jumping over obstacles and running for your life are made almost unplayable because of this. You might want to run for your life after playing all this. The decision to make the game unbearable in difficulty was on purpose, since you only have about two buttons to use for the first hour or so, and probably the whole game, I didn't get that far.

Every little thing becomes over complicated thanks to the outright broken physics that will make you want to rip out your hair. Slightly nudging something to the side is pure boredom, and so is everything else with this game. Don't stop yet, it gets worse. Your character is a helpless, young boy who can't defend himself to save his life. You don't fight a single enemy throughout the course of your quest, nobody fights for you (not in the stages that I was in anyway), all you do is run. Run, run, and run. Don't expect to do anything else. You won't be doing anything that's even slightly interesting or entertaining. Along the way, you'll meet up with a huge spider that begins to crawl after you as soon as it sees you. You don't get to fight it, you simply run until he goes away. Pathetic.

As for replay value, good luck finding anything other than the mundane quest. There is nothing else on offer, not a single extra feature or two to keep you occupied. If you're like me, you'll most likely get bored of the main game, and proceed to delete it from your gaming library without putting more than an hour into it. It's incredibly empty, and gives the player no further options. It looks very basic too, with some bland textures complete with fuzzy backgrounds. You'll start to hate the way it looks after a few minutes of staring at it. Oh, the sound isn't good either, mainly because there's hardly any in the entire game.

Limbo is a great example of how to fool people with a peculiar visual style and get away with not having decent gameplay. Apart from the atmosphere, everything else is amiss. It starts out alright, but quickly becomes a train wreck just minutes after. I got this game during the PlayStation Plus sale when it was free, and even then it's still not worth it. This is one of those games that receives positive critique just because of the way it looks, and not how it plays. Avoid.