The game’s themes of death and nihilism are apparent, but with a palpable reluctance to say anything specific about either topic, it’s hard to argue that the game adopts any one particular viewpoint. For example, many critics have noticed the recurring motif of insects and an amoral natural world, such as the spider you escape from in the early levels, but there are significant portions of the game which are set in factories and industrial complexes instead. It also doesn’t help that overall, Limbo’s thematic through-line is hard to follow, and while there are moments of profound design, few are sustained enough to truly feel impactful. As with all games which wind up defining a genre or design philosophy, Limbo will find it increasingly difficult to stand in comparison with games that expanded on its core tenets. But in 2018 and on the Switch, Limbo and its “sequel”, Inside, aren’t even the first of its ilk on the eShop, having been beaten to the punch by thematic successors like Bulb Boy, mechanical successors like Little Nightmares and recognisable contemporaries like Black: The Fall. It’s just that people compared the two because there wasn’t much else to compare them to… before the indie movement really took off, Limbo was truly a unique game.
Both are indie puzzle platformers designed around the player’s experience, but the similarities end there. It’s interesting to think that in its original release, Limbo found itself most commonly compared to Jonathan Blow’s Braid. It’s an old enough game now that, as far as we’re concerned, it’s okay to do that. In other words, this review will have spoilers. It’s time to give a game which predates the WiiU with the treatment of a retro-review, and to ask the dreaded question of whether it holds up to scrutiny. So I’m relieved that Playdead has released Limbo on the Switch, as finally it’s an opportunity to look at the game in hindsight. While I’d be reluctant to spoil an early twist two hours into a 15 hour game if it recontextualised player expectations, by that logic we’d be limiting coverage of Limbo to the game’s first 30 minutes. At just five hours long and with a design focused on player experience, suddenly everything became a spoiler and reviews could only describe Limbo with distanced judgements about how words couldn’t properly do it justice – and it’s hard to blame writers for this either. Playdead’s first foray into commercial games development came as a dream and a prayer, and its earnestness and sheer novelty on the Xbox Live Arcade back in 2010 made it a hard game to write about. I should preface this by saying this is not going to be an average review of Limbo.
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