The Xbox Live Arcade is more often than not the place where money goes to die. I'm not saying that there aren't some good indie titles on there, but let's face it: how often have you bought something off of the marketplace (either Microsoft or Sony) for 10 or 15 bucks thinking you got a real steal, only to play the damn game for an hour, maybe two, then completely forget about it? Seriously, it is an epidemic among downloadable titles. Unfortunately, this summer was not exactly a good summer to be a gamer. Well, ok, there was Starcraft II, but that was one game, and it still didn't come out until late July. And I didn't play it because I hate RTS games. Anyway, all of these factors taken in to consideration, I was desperate for something to play, happened to notice a little black-and-white platformer called Limbo and figured I'd give it a go.
The premise of Limbo is relatively simple. You are a little boy going through (wait for it) LIMBO in order to find your sister. The game doesn't actually tell you any of this, though. I got all of that from an article I read in Wired back in July where they interviewed a developer on the team and HE told them the premise. All the game ever insinuates is "walk right until you can't do that anymore". Well, that's an unfair simplification. In your rightward journey, you have to navigate puzzles, traps, and one of the most hostile environments I have experienced since Silent Hill 2. Everything, and I mean everything, is potentially there to kill you, and oftentimes you don't even know this fact until your recently liberated head is rolling down the hill behind you. You are often left to wonder whether those poky bits in the ground are just grass, or a bear trap that will chop off your legs. This can sometimes be due to the fact that everything is rendered in start blackness or "grim-despair grey", and it all starts to blend together, but the gamer rarely suffers that much on account of the style. Frequent checkpoints mean that you rarely have to replay areas in the first 3/4 of the game more than twice.
Pictured: Grass?
I only have a couple of complaints with the title overall, but they do carry a bit of weight to them. The first half of the game is all murky, grey, full of insects and unsettling sounds (padded with even more unsettling silences) and just top notch in atmospheric construction. About halfway through, however, the game sheds a lot of its insectoid and corpse filled atmosphere to turn into a physics puzzler in an industrial setting. And a very, VERY picky physics puzzler at that. The sudden skimping in the atmosphere department combined with the wacky difficulty curve jump make the latter half less fun than its creepy former half. Also, the game just ends. Like out of nowhere. You finish the last puzzle, watch a 20 second silent cut scene and then its done. I'm not saying I was thoroughly invested in the plight of the protagonist in the first place, but it seriously comes out of nowhere so quickly your head will spin.
"Hello? Was there supposed to be more game here?"
Some astute readers may be quick to point out that I haven't outright stated whether or not I like Limbo yet, and that is because I honestly don't know. When the game is trying to create atmosphere, it does so in a way unlike any other. A way that has you building bridges with the corpses of other children. Or solving scale puzzles with hanging bodies. And the presentation is really something to marvel at, both from an audio and visual perspective. In short, it is an artistic triumph, creating an astonishingly depressing continuous struggle against an entire world that is out to get you (not entirely unlike attending NYU for 4 years). The flipside of this coin, however, is the abandonment of this amazing atmosphere in the latter half, along with its frustrating brevity. I could start this game late in the afternoon and have it beaten in time to be drunk for dinner, and for a game that costs $15, that is unacceptable. Give Limbo a try, but from me to you, wait for a price drop. It'll be just as spooky and atmospheric in a month or two.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment