CGDD: LIMBO Game

LIMBO by Playdead

For this blog response, I chose to play LIMBO because the art style captivated me the most with its eerie yet somewhat endearing atmosphere. As I did little prior research on the game first, I was a bit confused when I first started playing because there were no directions on what to do, and what the primary goal was. The character is a little boy traveling alone through a dark forest/land, and you must solve some puzzles along the way to keep moving forward. 

The controls of the game were quite simple, but it took a little bit of time to figure it out with context clues. The character’s arms would automatically lift and hold onto items needing interaction, which gave hints that it was necessary to use this item for some purpose such as moving it to jump over something or to block an obstacle. Other subtle hints include ropes hanging from the trees and traps. The giant spiders were a little mortifying to deal with, cause there are no instructions so there is a lot of trial and error involved in this game, however, it is helpful that the respawn point is set right before the obstacle. There were some instances where I struggled with figuring out the puzzles because each one became more complicated than the last, so after trying numerous times, I had to look up tutorials for these sections of the game. 

I think the art of the game is incredibly pleasing to look at, even though it is in black and white. I am a fan of black and white art because it looks so simple yet meaningful, and this game art even makes some aspects look gory even through just using these two colors & mixing them. I was also kind of shocked at the amount of violence and dark aspects of this game because it would vividly show this kid’s body being cut up, crushed, drowned, impaled, and more. I did not end up completing the entire game because the puzzles became too difficult to solve, especially once the entire environment started turning clockwise/counterclockwise. I did end up watching the gameplay from the part I stopped at until the end, and found it quite interesting as I probably would’ve never been able to solve some of the puzzles unless I watched a tutorial. 

Overall this game is incredibly ambiguous and up to the player’s interpretation which was fun to see, as many other games usually follow a storyline or already provide background information and rules to follow. I really enjoyed that the only sounds came from things within the game, rather than having any background music as it set a more sinister and eerie atmosphere. I think visually it was pretty cute, although the horror aspect of it wasn’t scary, it just gave me some anxiety if I didn’t do things properly and the little boy died in a devastating way. I was also amazed that this game was released over a decade ago and its entire concept was quite fun and interesting!