- Even with the lack of color, the
beautiful artwork and design that incorporates only a black &
white monochrome element, creates one of the best-looking games
of the year
- Tremendously challenging physics-based gameplay with all its
puzzles, especially in the latter stages, although it is rather
brief and fleeting
- Gameplay loses its tension when
it transitions from escaping pursuit, most notably from the
scary giant spider, to simply being a puzzle-solving challenge
- Minimalist involvement in story (much of what’s really
occurring seems left up to the gamer’s imagination) fails to
connect gamers too emotionally with the main characters, namely
the boy and his “lost soul” sister, although there’s a lot of
emotional drama in the overall story – small boy searches for
his lost sister, who may possibly be dead and stuck in “limbo”
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Limbo
Score: 9.0 / 10
The edge of “darkness,” a limbo between the
brightness of day and the blackness of night, can be a scary place.
Especially if it is, in fact, the actual limbo, the otherworldly place
between the living and the dead, the intermediary waiting room between
heaven and hell.
The imaginative Xbox Live Arcade title LIMBO explores what happens when
someone in the land of the living goes searching for a presumably lost
soul in the
realm of the dead-in-waiting, as a young
boy crosses into limbo looking for his may-be-dead missing young sister.
This exceptional game incorporates classic side-scroller adventuring and
challenging puzzle-solving gameplay with a minimalist story (that leaves
the noir goings-on mostly up to the imagination of each individual
gamer)
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traversing through a darkly beautiful, artistically intriguing black &
white monochrome world that is one of the best-looking games of the
year, and possibly the best XBLA title of 2010.
Using only black & white to color the LIMBO landscape plunges gamers in
an instantly scary place. The beginning two levels have a high level of
stressful gameplay, too, with our unnamed little-boy hero on the run
from a monstrously large and deadly spider that chases him, all the
while with the gamer required to make their way past deadly traps that
can instantaneously bring a deathblow to the “missing persons” quest.
Gamers must avoid the spider catching them while also avoiding the
evil-intentioned individuals that are hell-bent on the hero’s demise
just as aggressively as the pursuing spider.
Unfortunately, LIMBO’s gameplay loses its level of emotional tenseness
that drives gamers frantically through the first few levels when it
transitions from escaping pursuit, most notably from the scary giant
spider, to simply being a “push/pull the crate” puzzle-solving
challenge. And it definitely is a challenge throughout the entire LIMBO
adventure, with physics-based solutions to many of the puzzles that
require intelligent-thinking strategies. Latter puzzles can get very
aggravating to decipher (particularly the magnetized blocks), which
detracts from what can be considered both a great story but one that is
so minimalist that it loses its emotional appeal until the depressingly
haunting and abrupt ending. Yes, LIMBO ends much too soon, although
gamers might want to LIMBO some more, going through the game a second
time to accomplish the game’s many achievements that will take a second
plunge into the dark to acquire.
There seems to be a little too much hype touting LIMBO as the best
overall game of 2010. However, with gameplay that goes from stressfully
tense to simply a puzzle-solving undertaking that never completely
evolves into what should be an emotionally charged adventure that ends
way too quickly, LIMBO has some minor detractions which switch the light
off in its beacon as 2010’s possible overall “Game of the Year.” But
LIMBO is easily among the best XBLA titles of the year that anybody who
plays it won’t soon forget for its magnificent art design, tough puzzles
and dismally sad story.
