Limbo
I sat down and played Limbo, newly released for Steam, this weekend. I was blown away by the trailers – it looked dark and intriguing. It looks like no other game I’d ever seen. An I still can’t say it was like any other game I’ve ever played. It’s sort of a rag-doll-physics, meets the incredible machine, meets peter pan, meets Saw – all in black and white.
So visually it was really cool and it sounds like that’s what it won it’s awards for. The game play was fine. It wasn’t great, and wasn’t terrible. It took me about an hour and a half to finally get the jumping portion of the controls down which was really annoying. The puzzles were mostly fairly intuitive, but some were quite hard to execute even if you knew what you were doing. For full disclosure, I got stuck at one point and used an online walk-through to get through chapter 22 (I think). Overall I would say the game is worth about the $10 I paid for it. That’s a better value than going to the movies, though it didn’t move me nearly as much (the environment was cool and I think I understand how most of it ties in, but some of it just seems like fluff).
Did they do a good job? Yes. Is it the best game ever? No. Would I recommend it to someone else? Possibly, if the price goes down to $5. I would recommend Braid first though.
A couple lessons I learned:
- Having responsive controls matters if game progress is dependent on jumping or other precise actions.
- Showing game chapters is nice because it shows progress / encourages a discouraged player to keep going.
- Making the player die (a lot) in the game is not bad, as long as they are able to progress at a reasonable rate and regenerate at a point without danger.