Limbo

Overview

One of the big names in the late 2000s/early 2010s "indie games" wave, Limbo starts strong but suffers toward the end, even if it is fairly short. This review also contains spoilers if you still haven't played it yet.

Review

Even though I missed the original release of Limbo when it made waves back in 2010 (played it in 2016, after I got an actual PC), I was familiar with indie games at that point, having played through a good chunk of one of the "Humble Indie Bundle" bundles from Humble Bundle several years prior. One of the consistent things I noticed was that for a good number of titles, you had an innovative title but they couldn't carry it through even for a handful of hours; by the last level you just want it to end.

Such was the case of Limbo. The first third of the game is great, lost in the woods, with spiders, some pretty clever traps (reminded me of I Wanna Be The Guy) that will often see the boy's head separated from his body, and some other children who are DEFINITELY not your friends. For a while, it's all good, with a great atmosphere—flies, bad water, and a spider that continues to menace you until it has but one leg left, around halfway through it departs that for a more industrial/urban world, where the first real puzzle is timing a jump on a flickering hotel sign to not be electrocuted. There's still some good atmosphere/themes but then for several puzzles has you escaping rising water, and eventually all of that segues into an anti-gravity world with elements of everything thrown together.

Then you finally find your sister at the end and it cuts to your corpses surrounded by flies, roll credits. Still, the game intrigued me enough that I ended up buying INSIDE at full price.

Player Notes

I played Limbo around October 2016, and wrote this review at some point later, it's been sitting in a Word document for a number of years at this point before eventually finishing it in late August 2026.

Port & Rerelease Notes

Limbo originally appeared as an Xbox 360 for the "Summer of Arcade" promotion, but ports began appearing in 2011, with PlayStation 3 coming in July 2011 and Steam shortly after. The most recent port of the game was to the Nintendo Switch in 2018; by this time, ports to OS X, PlayStation Vita, iOS, Linux, Xbox One, Android, and PlayStation 4 had been released (see Wikipedia).