LIMBO
By Playdead
Genre: Platforming/exploration
“Uncertain of his sister’s fate, a boy enters LIMBO” – honestly, this sparse description given on Steam’s Store Page for this wonderfully understated, creepy game is all you need know of the story when you start playing. To say much more of it would be horribly spoiling what is an amazing and wonderful experience, albeit an unsettling one to say the least.
However, I can give gameplay details and extrapolations. The game is totally in black and white, the only different color being that of the boy’s eyes, being slightly brighter than the other visible elements. You scroll mostly to the right on a 2D plane as you wander through the titular space between Heaven and Hell, through forests, factories, villages and other run-down environs.
EVERYTHING will be trying to kill you, from a ravenous spider to the other native inhabitants of this continuous, load-free realm. And the deaths you experience come quick, soon and gory; thank the developers that not much visual detail is rendered. What you hear, though, more than makes up for what you can’t see; they’re not happy sounds, let’s say.
Don’t let this stop you from experiencing an amazing experience that actually reminds me of the classic game Out of This World; in it you also walked/ran on a 2D plane through bleak environments, death came often though cheaply (passwords provided easy access to most points in the game, and here, the checkpoints are plentiful), and the graphics, while sparse in both, feature amazing animation both of the main character and his obstacles.
As I said before, saying much more about this masterpiece would be doing it a disservice; you owe it to yourself to check it out. Five out of five for this.