Limbo

After updating my Onimusha beating on my backloggery.com page, I used that site's "fortune cookie" feature to figure out which game I wanted to play next. Out of my 72 unbeaten games, the site directed me towards what was probably my shortest remaining game in Limbo, an Xbox Live Arcade game that came out a few months ago. I was pleased with the decision and set out to beat the game, doing so in the span of two or three hours just now. I liked it. I liked it a lot. This is one of those games that makes for great evidence in the "video games can be artistic" debate. The whole theme here is minimalism. Black and white environments, no dialogue, no story to speak of, no music aside form some ambient sounds. Some games can really just take you away into their own atmosphere. This game reminded me of World of Goo in its ability to do so. (Actually, that game was also rather minimalistic in tone. Hmm.) Anyway, the most natural comparison to make is with Braid, another quick but beautiful puzzle platformer XBLA game. But the biggest praise for Braid is directed at its very unclear and hazy story. People rave about the hew lines of text that game offers as a narrative and go off interpreting all sorts of things. I didn't like that. I mean, I enjoyed the game itself plenty, but the Internet seemed ready to go to war over what everything in Braid meant. With Limbo, you get an even less clear plot and narrative. And to me, that works even better. Rather than be able to shove your own interpretation everywhere by using a few vague lines of text as symbolic evidence, you can think whatever you want to and enjoy it all the same. My own interpretation of Limbo - which, plot-wise, merely consists of a boy waking up in the wilderness, venturing through a bunch of traps and hazards, and ultimately finding a girl right back where he started out from - is rather unimaginative and simple. But I can totally understand where other people are coming from when they say, "the boy has gone through hell and back to find his sister," or, "the boy had to face a lot of demons in order to finally accept his sister's death." For me, that works much better than Braid's "maybe the princess is a nuclear warhead, or maybe just your ex-wife, or maybe the embodiment of time, or maybe a half-assed Princess Peach parody" debate. My only beef with Limbo was that a few times I found (and collected) an egg necessary for a certain Xbox achievement, and the game didn't give me said achievement. It's not like my Gamerscore matters more to me than the wonder of the game itself, but still - what gives? Sloppy achievement-nullifying errors ain't cool! Anyway, this was a great game, and one of the best I've played on the Xbox Live Arcade.