I really like the sparse black and white art style they've gone with throughout the game. All the foreground elements were black silhouettes with multiple hazy background layers moving at different speeds to give a sense of depth. It's like that multiplane camera technique you see in old Popeye cartoons. It looks great.
Something you learn early on in this game is that death is around every turn, it's varied, and it's brutal. Pits with spikes, bear traps, a spider the size of Shelob, giant saws, machine guns, or...a mere three feet of water...all perilous. (Yeah, drowning is hella easy in this game.) The point is, there are lots of ways to die, and unlike a lot of games, when it happens, it had a tendency to make me recoil a bit. You'll be flung like a ragdoll, chopped into tiny pieces and violently strewn about, smashed, electrocuted, and probably impaled by a giant spider leg.
Part of this feeling of brutality comes from the excellent sound design in this game. I keep mentioning the spider because I think this thing was the cause of my first death, and it was memorable. The tremendous thud as its leg went through me and into the ground seemed to have a lot of force due to the sounds associated. Plus, the spider just walks away, my lifeless corpse still impaled on those pointy legs. What an asshole... The sound design is just very good. It's believable, and there's an economy of sound that causes anything out of the ordinary to make your ears perk up. You'll pause momentarily and perhaps proceed with a little more caution. In most games you won't notice the sound design at all unless it's so poor it calls attention to itself. It's nice when sound is used effectively to enrich the experience.
Regarding controls, you're limited to your arrow keys for directional movement and the control key for interacting with the world. (Pull a crate, flip a lever, etc.) It's not very complex, but it doesn't need to be. In a way, I felt like the limited amount of actions I could perform made the world all the more foreboding and scary. If something's attacking me, there is a relatively small number of things I can do. There are no weapons, so I can't fight it head on, which is unusual in the game realm. It seemed to make you feel a little more helpless in this dangerous world.
As you navigate through the world, the world evolves, bringing new challenges and perils. You start in a forested area and as you progress, the locations gradually becomes more industrialized. This evolution and variety of scenery made it very enjoyable to explore the world and as a result, nothing ever got too familiar. I wasn't sure where I was going or what I was looking for, but I was enjoying looking for it.
And that brings me to the perplexing bit... While I was playing, I didn't know what I was looking for, and after a time, there I sat, done with the game, and I still wasn't all that sure what I had been looking for. If you look at the tagline of the game, it reads, "Uncertain of his sister's fate, a boy enters LIMBO". Ah...I was looking for my sister. There was a person there at the end. A lady person... I suppose that was her...which means I win. Yay? I'm unsure how I was supposed to draw that conclusion by the content of the game alone, but I'll take that as a given since you bothered writing it and all.
There are a lot of theories about the meaning and symbolism present throughout the entire game and especially regarding the ending. A lot of them seem to be reaching a bit and others sound like total bullshit. I've never been one for symbolism and such though. *shrug* The developers keep the theorizing going by saying that it's up to the user's own interpretation. You smug bastards... I know you had a certain intent when you made the game. Nothing you did was on accident.
I won't go into the various theories because there are A LOT of them. Besides, LIMBO is definitely worth a play and going into it with preconceived notions about the meaning is going to alter your own interpretation, which will give the devs sad feels.
So yes, it was an enjoyable game, and they made me ponder on symbolism, which I hate. That's quite a success. I'm still pondering it, in fact, so my hat goes off to them. Well done, devs. Well done.
No comments:
Post a Comment