Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

When a game starts getting called art, something in my head just goes bananas. It's like a siren, warning me of an incoming air raid. That happens due to how often this has been happening over the past few years and how generally, said games just fall flat when I actually get to play them. Limbo is the newest of said titles, the first of Microsoft's yearly Summer of Arcade, a special selection of XBLA downloads that's been going on for a while.

A critical darling the last few game shows like E3 and GDC, Limbo is a game that has great aesthetics and a fresh presentation, all while the while sporting incredibly simple gameplay and an even barer plot. A little boy is looking for his sister in a dark forest… and not much else. The problem with Limbo, though, is that the content doesn't really follow the presentation in terms of quality, and even the beautiful art has some blemishes that are bound to pinch a lot players' nerves.

When I said this game's simple to play, I wasn't beating around the bush as there are only two buttons you have to worry about: jump and activate. Like any side-scrollers, there are plenty of obstacles to worry about, along with deadly traps and puzzles. These puzzles range from simply pushing blocks to more complex gravity dependant connundrums.

Part of my frustration with Limbo comes from how these puzzles and traps are dealt along the way. Thanks to the often times very dark presentation – this goes two ways in this game, but for now, 'dark' as in lack of light – some traps come out of nowhere, killing you off and forcing you to restart. At other points, foreground and background objects blend and what seemed to be in reach turns out to be scenery, often resulting in gory deaths.

Gore is another aspect of the game that might turn some people off. Even though the entire cast of characters, creatures and objects are presented as puppet-like shadows against a grayish background, deaths are very graphical. Thanks to the minimalist presentation, a lot is left to the imagination, which makes Limbo a game not recommended for kids. Some of the graphical violence can be turned off, but the dark tone of the game is enough to make up for more of the atmosphere, which is what makes up for most of the charm, but also for one of its blemishes.

Another topic of contention that has been buzzing around the web is how short of a game Limbo turns out to be. In its defense, I can positively say it lasted as long as I wanted to play it. That can go both ways, I admit. The pace of the game does not slow throughout its short one to two hour span, other than the occasional puzzle stump.

On the other hand, thanks to the many frustrations I had playing this, I was just about done with it when the credits hit. The tune of presenting puzzles by death is played all too often in Limbo, which makes it extremely difficult to jump back to. It's one of the most diminished of returns on Xbox Live Arcade, even if you take into account its few hidden collectibles that are part of its achievement list.

Limbo is just one of those games that seemed to have been born out of an incredible set of concept art images, with gameplay sewn around it. It's simply beautiful to look at with very unique art, but when things start moving, it quickly becomes an annoyingly frustrating mesh of clever 'oh-I-got-it!' puzzles that are blemished by a not so clever 'oh-my-god-I-want-to-turn-this-off' trial by death style that is sure to get in a lot of nerves, as it did mine.