Limbo

Alice Taylor

Limbo, the game that made me cry.

The game that made me cry: “games that make you cry” is a stone-cold cliché in game circles now, the gauntlet from the olden media that games will never be a true art form until games can make us cry. Why cry, game designers ask, per se? Will Wright, eminent games designer and creator of The Sims, wondered out loud what this obsession with crying was about, when games can invoke any number of other emotions that non-interactive media can’t.

Like guilt, in torturing your creature in Black & White.
Maybe film or theatre can make you feel guilt?
What about responsibility? I’ve felt responsibility, as defense in Quake.
Ruefulness, when I probably shouldn’t have blown all my money on
a perfectly-symmetrical train network until I had enough residents in Sim City.
Triumph, in any number of games. Accomplishment, ditto.

But, so, crying.

I cried at the end of Limbo. It might be in part because Limbo is so hard to play, maybe it was crying with relief: on reading the Wikipedia entry, its creators call the play style “trial and death”. It might be though because I’d done a bit of browsing beforehand, on the run-up to its release, and I already knew that the game was about a little boy searching for his dead sister.

Dead siblings or children always makes me cry. Is his sister really dead, or is it a dream? Actually, we don’t really ever know, but the name of the game suggests perhaps they’re dead. Or she’s dead and he’s not. Such nuance.
At the end, of course, he finds her. Bawl.

Limbo is a black and white, side-scrolling, platform puzzler game. Which is to say, it’s in light and shadow; you move left and right, you can jump up, down, and hang, and there are puzzles to solve before you can progress.

Puzzles like, how to get past the giant, quite terrifying spider with deadly stabbing legs. How to cross the electrified neon sign in the rain without being electrocuted. How to get across a ravine, by means of a rope swing, when there are open bear traps about. That kind of thing. For every single puzzle, you discover how it works by dying, a lot.

I’m not very good at dying. In all the games I like to play, I like to stay alive, to preserve my life and the life of my pals. In Left 4 Dead it’s all about survival, and do I like to survive, I gravitate towards scenarios of helping people as part of a team, taking part together to survive and overcome. Parties of 5 in World of Warcraft where we will toil for 3 hours in a row to take down a creature.

Limbo had me die instantly, pretty much in the opening minute. Twice, three times.
I went straight to Twitter: wait, what, why am I dying so much? What on earth,
is this supposed to be fun? I’m going for the walkthrough!

There was a mixed response, divided into two camps: those who thought using a walkthrough would mean a diminished sense of accomplishment at the end (undoubtedly true), and those who thought the raised blood pressure, and time constraints of the working day, would mean a walkthrough is the only way to be able to complete a game like Limbo.

I went for the walkthrough. I’m short on time, and low on patience: maybe I could learn to use a game like Limbo as a form of patience meditation, but – of course - I don’t have time for that.

Anyway, I want to get to the end, have some closure, learn what happens to these characters in this world. The walkthrough meant that after three deaths at each puzzle point – and they were mere inches apart in some cases – I probably finished the game after a few solid hours of gameplay. In reality, it was stretched over about a week. Limbo week.

Limbo is beautiful.

Haunting, melodious, atmospheric, sweet.
Still somewhat macho too, though, so as not to get too syrupy about it.
The deaths are very brutal. The ragdoll physics of the little boy’s body
as he’s hurled away by a monster, or cut into pieces by an advancing woodsaw, or snapped into mush by a bear trap. It makes you physically wince.
But then you respawn, and on you go.

What does this teach us? Try, try, try again. Keep trying, failure is simply a learning experience, not the end of the world. But you don’t progress if you die.
That’s true, I’m sure.

I steered the little boy along, past the puzzles. Through inverted gravity, across fields, through forests of giant spiders and humanesque enemies who shot arrows or otherwise attempted to stop my progress.

I was never told why, or who these people might be. Why are they shooting at me? Why did I not give up? Dying over and over is painful; I’m not sure why I didn’t give up: probably because I wanted to see what was going to happen at the end, I felt riveted, and I found the whole experience to be gently satisfying, cosy somehow.

Solitary, but that’s okay for such a thing, I knew the end was in sight. I knew I was having a meaningful experience. Somehow. I noticed the log’s shadow is the shape of a wolf’s head, and guessed it didn’t mean anything but was a simple flourish.
I liked that.

Eventually, after a set of particularly awful, world-shifting gravity puzzles, which told me the end had to be near – it couldn’t go harder than this, that wouldn’t work – my little boy burst out through a pane of glass, and landed again in the clearing in the woods where he started. But there’s no buried body with flies buzzing here anymore: just a girl with her back to me, picking a flower.

Why are we at the beginning again, where’s the buried body, am I even in the same place? She’s startled by the crashing, and stiffens, and the game screen goes black. The End.

It’s quite a shock, as endings go. I didn’t realise I wouldn’t be told what happens next, that it was over, and I found myself inhaling sharply, and happy for the little boy – he found his sister! – and having a good, sudden, short cry.
What a sweet game! What relief!

But suddenly I also felt somewhat infuriated, who was the girl, was she alive, what did I miss? I certainly didn’t get all the achievements or apparently play every corner of the game, my “percentage complete” score – and it measured me against my friends too, in a traditionally challenging way – was 83%. Higher than most, less than some. 83%? But I finished the game? I must have missed something in there.

I started it over again.

In retrospect, I can’t say what Limbo means, or what it was designed to mean.
There’s plenty of discussion on the subject across the nets, and a lengthy Wikipedia entry. But I do know well that it meant something to me: I value those two hours of play over many ordinary things, as I appear to remember them very clearly.
I tangibly remember the sense of curiosity, the tiptoeing, the fear of the next death.
I remember the crying, and I remember it with a sense of peacefulness and accomplishment.