12/26/2023 0 Comments Limbo game meaning![]() Puzzles become more difficult, for the sake of being complex, but you don’t feel the same drive to progress. About halfway through you are moved out of the wilderness and into decaying city structures at the expense of ambiance. There are giant spiders, child corpses, child antagonists, but ultimately the environment is the greatest enemy. The game is experiential, and is not unlike the novella The Birds in making you feel the unexplainable misery of the character as you progress. Why do you have endless lives? Who built this place? Why are there white butterflies? What giant spider lives on to attack you with only one leg? If you didn’t do some digging, you wouldn’t even know that you’re looking for your sister. There is, ostensibly, no greater meaning, no overarching theme. Limbo wants you to connect the dots, even if the dots were never designed to create a picture. Trouble is, at about halfway through I didn’t want to play it. There’s never really an obvious stopping point, instead you press on, as afraid of quitting as you are of the next booby trap. Puzzles are amusing in their macabre cruelty, but they lend no sense to the universe.Īs for quitting time, Limbo employs a bit of camouflage here courtesy of all those carefully placed autosaves. Designed around some basic physics some puzzles use the environment to disguise buttons, some buttons aren’t buttons, and then there’s a little gravity inversion thrown into the mix. The sound effects that do crop up from time to time are careful cues to a puzzle’s solution, or even warn of unseen danger. It’s not you, it’s not your console, it’s the game – Limbo wants you to be very, very quiet. If, like mine, your 360 produces a gentle roar, you will catch yourself cranking up the volume. The game is viewed as though through cataracts, a hazy fish eye lens. This is mitigated by the frequent auto-saves that keep you safely grounded at puzzle start. Timing is increasingly critical to solving the puzzles, which occasionally makes the floaty jumps frustrating. Most hazards are carefully hidden, in shadow or disguised within something useful. A puzzler, you traverse the environment in side-scrolling fashion, interacting with objects to avoid nasty, gruesome death. Instead, the little boy is impaled, shot, decapitated, crushed or drowned. You will never find yourself scraped up, battered, injured or wheezing. In Limbo, death is the punishment for just about everything. Off-balance from the start, you are quickly introduced to the game’s cruelty the first time you explore just a little too much – and are rewarded with brutal execution. Limbo places you in a fuzzy, black and white nightmare with little explanation and no instruction other than the compulsion to run right. From Link to Ico to this nameless little guy, the boyish avatars have met with successively darker struggles. Not sure what it is about video games, but we like to play as little boys.
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