What is Limbo? An atmospheric platformer with a focus on puzzles. The world of eternal twilight, where death lies in wait at every step. Amazing harmony of graphics, voice acting and gameplay. A story told without words …
Foreword
Halfway through earthly life,
I found myself in a dark forest
Lost the right path in the darkness of the valley.
What he was, oh, how I will say
That wild forest, dense and threatening,
Whose old horror in my memory I carry!
Dante Alighieri.
The Divine Comedy
These lines from the beginning of the Divine Comedy could become an ideal epigraph for Limbo herself … if not for one 'but' – our hero did not have time to get to the middle of his life. He got into the local analogue of Purgatory as a child, at the age of about ten years. But the Gloomy Forest is present in all its glory, and such that Dante never dreamed of.
Game world
It is impossible for fear to command the mind;
Otherwise, we move away from accomplishments,
Like a beast when he sees
Dante Alighieri.
The Divine Comedy
Twilight is just a short interval between day and night. But here the moment turned into eternity, the night died before it could be born, and there was never a dawn at all. Time in the Limbo world is forever frozen in the hazy 'now', and the whole world consists only of different shades of gray.
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The demiurge who created this world was much more cruel than it might seem at first. As a child, a creak heard at night or a shadow wriggling in the headlights can scare much more than any real danger. In the face of the unknown, even the most common thing can be transformed by a fervent imagination into a terrible monster. Here everything consists of barely distinguishable silhouettes and deceiving shadows, false hopes and deceitful hints. Despite the minimalism style chosen by the designers, everything is drawn just fine. Sometimes the game looks more like a high-quality cartoon than a mobile puzzle. True, all associations with the good old 'Hedgehog in the Fog' dissipate after a few minutes of the game, when you realize that not all the horrors in this world are invented. Although this place is called Limb, it looks more like one of the circles of Hell, which we are not allowed to forget for a minute.
The player himself will have for some time to feel himself in the shoes of a ten-year-old boy who finds himself alone in a dark and terrible forest. You will have to peer into the silhouettes poorly distinguishable in the darkness and ask yourself whether they are trees or bloodthirsty monsters more than once or twice. But all the same it will not save you from mistakes – you will have to die often in the game. Any knowledge is paid in blood here, and sometimes it is possible to understand the principle of operation of a particular trap in only one way – by stepping into it. The gloom hides the details of what happened, but the game does not become kinder from this – the imagination draws the details much better than the artist could do. But the emotions from solving each puzzle are much brighter than after completing the level of some 'Crocodile Swampy'.
Plot
And he: 'My response to your word –
Complete; when desire is fair
Then you have to silently follow it '
Dante Alighieri.
The Divine Comedy
The plot of the story is as mysterious and ambiguous as the landscape woven from gray shadows. And at the same time – no less simple and ruthless than the open mouth of a trap hidden in the darkness.
It is possible that this place is Catholic Limb, or maybe the mysterious Dark Forest growing on the edge of Hell. In any case, the word 'limbus' is translated from Latin exactly as 'edge'. Maybe our hero voluntarily came down here from the world of the living, or maybe he died long ago and his soul came here after death. The game is in no hurry to reveal its secrets, but gladly throws hints that can be interpreted in different ways. Only one thing is known for certain – the hero must find his sister and will stubbornly go forward until he reaches his goal.
The ending of the story is open, it is more an ellipsis than a bullet. But the feeling of the ending hanging in the air does not arise, the game developers said exactly what they wanted to say, even if you can interpret what is happening on the screen in different ways. Although no one bothers to simply brush off all allusions and not look for some hidden meaning in this story – neither the gameplay nor the atmosphere of the game will suffer from this.
Game process
It's time for you to find out
What seems to be at first when climbing
Every mountain is always cool
Dante Alighieri.
The Divine Comedy
Whoever does not surrender himself is invincible
Dante Alighieri.
The Divine Comedy
The genre of the game is a cross between a classic platformer and a logic puzzle. You often have to use your brains (especially if you don't run to look for a ready-made solution on the Internet), but finding the right solution to the problem and understanding what exactly needs to be done here is only half the battle. You also need to be able to implement the plan, and on the first try this is also not always possible. Therefore, it is very difficult to estimate the duration of the game. Probably, if you watch the passage in advance, you will be able to pass it in a couple of hours. But it doesn't make more sense than reading the detective story from the last page.
This world lives by its own rules and it doesn't care about our ideas about beauty. Most of all, it resembles a nightmare dreamed at night, which, although created by our own imagination, lives some kind of life of its own and develops according to its own laws. Every minute he moves further and further from the logic we are used to, but you do not notice it. When it comes to games with gravity or flying on a giant fly, and a forest is replaced by a ghost town or a gloomy factory, this, for some reason, is taken for granted.
The controls in Limbo are simple, even a person far from mobile games will get used to it quickly enough. We control the movement of the hero using tapes on the left side of the screen, jumping – swipes on the right. To interact with an object (for example, to pull a lever or drag a box to another place), just click on the screen on the right side. At the same time, the buttons of the virtual joystick themselves are not visible, the picture takes up all the space on the screen, and even the pause button must be pressed blindly.
Outcome
Believe me – when there are no mean thoughts in us,
We shouldn't be afraid of anything.
Evil to your neighbor is where the source of trouble is,
It will throw it into the abyss, it may happen.
Dante Alighieri.
The Divine Comedy
Initially, the game was not created for mobile devices at all. It was released on PCs and consoles back in 2010, but it only reached mobile OS in early 2015. True, it is very difficult to believe that we are faced with just a ported version of a game developed for another platform – Limbo fit perfectly into smartphones. It is even more difficult to believe that this is a modest indie project created by a tiny studio of three people, such a level of performance will be the envy of many large firms.
From a technical point of view, the game is nothing special, a standard platformer with an emphasis on puzzles. But the visual style and stunning ambiance make Limbo a true masterpiece that is definitely worth seeing. This proves once again a solid list of more than a hundred awards won by the game, positive feedback from players and high ratings in the gaming press. True, the second half of the game 'touches' a little less than the beginning – the gloomy forest turned out by the authors to be much more lively and frightening than a mechanical plant living its own life.
| Demo version: is free   |
Full version: 150.00 p.  |
