Game Reviews

With the influx of pretty independent games over the last ten years it's easy to start glazing over when you're staring at high quality artsy aesthetic. The Noughties taught us that armchair productions weren't actually rubbish after all. The days of churning out cheap flash games in your basement had evolved into a highly stylistic thinking-man's trade and soon we were inundated with the likes of Braid or Flow. It's gotten to the point that pretty games happen so often in smaller studios it starts to feel like part of their job description to crank out stunning material.

But Limbo is pretty. It's incredibly pretty. 10 seconds into the game and it looks like Tim Burton's entry into XBLA development. "You know what this game needs?" he'd say, and he'd tap at his telly, "More black." The game is strikingly dark. It's a black-and-grey platformer coming out of Playdead, a tiny Copenhagen-based studio. The game's aesthetic had been honed for six years while its designer had been working professionally as a graphic illustrator, and it shows: the game is stunning.

The closest visual comparison is cinema from the 20s. The game begins with LIMBO scrawled on the screen in white-light font that shakes just enough to look like it's been shot out of a projector. The rest of the game is largely shadows and silhouettes, and what's not black is softly blurred, forcing you to focus intently on the environment for puzzle pieces.

That black square in the foreground is a box: jump on it or pull it over to that black rope hanging from that black tree over there. Shades end up having their own function in the game, hinting at what's important to the puzzle and what just looks quite good