This article is part of our test series, Backlog Club, where we (Nintendo Life!) picked a game that was on the “game we should play” list and then we (NL + you!) spent the next month playing it. This is the finale of this month, after we played Inside before.
So now that October has passed October, it’s time for Kate to finish Limbo…
Limbo is one of those games that you arrange yes play. It’s a famous piece, one of my first that has inspired a wave of thought puzzles that aren’t just about mechanics. So of course it’s my personal backlog – but, I’ll be honest: I let it go.
I’ve played a bit of Limbo before. In fact, it was a long time ago – when it was on Xbox Live Arcade – and I quickly gave up. It’s a tough game, and I’m not really a patient person. But surely ten years has made me a more patient person? Isn’t that the whole point of aging, making you wiser and calmer?
HAPPY NO.
I’ve never wanted to throw stuff at the TV and sulk as much as I did when playing Limbo. Can play it after internal is a mistake, because I feel like Inside is a beautifully executed improvement on Limbo’s operandi pattern, and I think Limbo pales in comparison. Maybe you disagree with me, and that’s perfectly fine, but at least hear me out first.
The way Limbo is structured makes it a trial-and-error puzzle. Every little black and white puzzle vignette has a solution, and it’s often not obvious at first. It will involve precise placement of boxes, extremely tight timing and avoiding all of the game’s killer obstacles to get through each box. Failure often results in your avatar, a little paper doll silhouette of a boy, killed in one of countless gruesome ways: cut by a hacksaw, transformed into a boy. Baby gets stuck by a mysterious thing, zombies get into a hole by a brain worm, or bullet hole with a laser. Anyway, who built this murder factory?
But let’s go back a bit to what I said before: I’m not a patient person. Obviously there’s a limit to the number of times I can watch a game of gleeful ripping off the kid on my screen before I start to feel comfortable. Unfortunately for me, Limbo completely have fun in failure.
Many of Limbo’s puzzles make it feel like you’re communicating almost directly with the puzzle designers, as if they’re watching you through a one-way mirror and whining when you discover a new kind of electricity can kill the boys or the boxes falling on your head are very bad for your longevity. I can To listen surname. The way the puzzles are designed, unless you know exactly what to do (or you’re very lucky) you will fail each one at least once, and that’s what the designers want from you – check out Break through failure.
And hey, I’m not against that! Learning from mistakes is an important part of being a human, and Limbo isn’t punishment – you’ll only be kicked back to the beginning of the puzzle when the designers put on excited faces. their glasses and urge you to try again. Plus, I admire roguelikesa genre that revolves around learning from the mistakes you made in your previous run and perfecting your technique to do it June a little further on the next one.
But there’s something about Limbo’s specific brand of “oooooh, that’s not true, move on, try again” that really doesn’t work for me. Do you remember Dad bean? It’s okay if you don’t. It was a brief meme about a moment on Twitter in which a man refused to help his nine-year-old daughter open a can of beans because it was a “Teaching Moment”. It took her hours to figure out how to use the can opener, because he refused instructions. She’s hungry, she’s tired, she understandable angry at her father for being a weird and confusing Rumpelstiltskin, rubbing her hands together and urging her to try harder instead of just helping her open the damn beans.
Limbo is my bean daddy. I understood that it was trying to teach me everything and to test me, but it turned out that it was not my hobby. I don’t want my fragile baby body to be thrown into the pit because I didn’t put the crate in the correct position, or I jumped on a ladder 0.2 seconds too late. And don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate Limbo’s puzzle design – it’s incredibly clever, and there’s a reason people love it so much – but an opener is also a design. smart. It doesn’t help if you just want beans. Or, in Limbo’s case, to enjoy yourself.
I think that’s why I liked Inside, and ended up not liking Limbo. The inside has a clever puzzle design and allows you to repeat on it more freely; Limbo deserves much more punishment, and though it does have some “ah-ha!” Quite nice! moment, it’s more “oh come above“moment. I know what I have to do! I just can’t get the timing right! I’ve never been good at timing!!!
I have to admit that I feel like I’m one of those people who play games like Super Mario Odyssey or Skyrim before the old classic, and saying that the originals are all trash, right? But like trying to grapple with the stale camera controls and frustrating mechanics of those old classics, Limbo made me feel stupid and slow. Maybe if I had played Limbo more when it was a hot new game, I could have appreciated more what it’s doing, and how it has helped shape the indie game landscape as it is today. So for the record, Limbo is a very impressive game, with some very impressive puzzle designs. But I’m too hungry and too tired. I just want to break it and eat all the beans.
Another month, another Backlog Club entry crossed our list! What should we play next, backloggers? Let me know your game pick in the comments section below.
