Limbo and The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom
Andy Jih
Introduction
On paper, Limbo and The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom appear to be brothers in arms – both games are puzzle-platformers released on Xbox Live Arcade46 within five months of each other. Both games are highly stylized as they are shown primarily in black and white, have no spoken dialogue, and have strong references to films and art styles from around the 1920s. They were also both well-received critically, though, to my best estimation, Limbo has been a greater financial success47. Despite their similarities, their differences in approach regarding context and presentation as well as tone and style result in play experiences that could not be more divergent. In looking to Jesse Schell’s lens of Essential Experience, games are artifacts and a means to creating experiences, and not only is how the game constructed important, but taking a holistic view of the game, its presentation, and how players play, are all key in how a player experiences the game.
The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom began as a student project by a team of students at the University of Southern California Interactive Media program. It soon made the rounds in various indie game competitions, and later resulted in the formation of the company, The Odd Gentlemen, and a publishing deal with
2K Games.
The game features P.B. Winterbottom as a sort of anti-hero; his primary goal being to eat as much pie as possible, and in the process, wreaking havoc everywhere he goes. Through the tutorial, he gets lured by a mystical pie into a portal that takes him to a parallel universe where clones of himself are running about. From here, the game’s primary game mechanic is introduced - while holding down a button, the player is able to record all of Winterbottom’s actions such as running, jumping, or swinging his umbrella. Once the player releases the button, a clone of Winterbottom is created that goes through the exact same motions that the player had just recorded in a repeated loop. The player-controlled Winterbottom can then interact with the clones, such as standing on top of them to reach higher platforms, or swinging his umbrella to hit the clones to pies that might otherwise be out of reach. To complete each level, the player must collect all of the pies through the creative use of Winterbottom’s clones. Each level has a limit to the number of clones that can be on-screen simultaneously. Using this game mechanic as a foundation, all of the levels and puzzles take this foundation and present various twists and variations throughout the course of the game.
While The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom began as a student project, Limbo was created by Playdead Studios, a small independent game studio located in Copenhagen, Denmark. Arnt Jensen had the initial idea behind Limbo beginning in 2004, but after beginning to work on it on his own, he realized that he required the assistance of a programmer. He created an art trailer in order to garner interest to recruit a programmer. Dino Patti signed on, and Playdead Studios was founded shortly thereafter in 2006. Limbo has been in development since then, has won a variety of indie game awards, and was released on Xbox Live Arcade in July, 2010.
Limbo has very little by way of exposition or overt narrative – the game begins in the woods with an unnamed boy shown in silhouette lying seemingly unconscious on the ground. After the player presses a button, the boy’s eyes open and he stands up. The player is then in control, though the game has provided no overt instructions or tutorial to guide the player’s actions. Through experimentation alone, the player is able to move the boy left and right, jump, and hold onto objects. With only those interactions, the player must then solve a variety of platforming puzzles to progress further in the game. The game is split up into chapters, though how those chapters are divided is only apparent from the chapter selection menu; no UI or menus ever appear during gameplay unless the player pauses the game. Much like Winterbottom, Limbo takes a core set of interactions and constructs myriad inventive puzzles around them.
What follows is an analysis of each of the games’ various features and designs such as art style, gameplay, and narrative. In placing these two games side by side, their respective strengths and weaknesses are shown, and I contend that one game, despite its developers’ best efforts, succumbs to ludonarrative dissonance while the other is able to succeed in creating a wholly cohesive and entertaining experience.
Art style
Limbo’s art style borrows very heavily from film noir and by extension, German expressionism. German Expressionism was a style of film made in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, and most films of the style were made on relatively low budgets compared to the films made in Hollywood. Given these budgetary constraints, the filmmakers often utilized stark, stylized, and surreal sets and designs in lieu of creating life-like and extravagant sets. Films made in that time period and style often used such aesthetics in order to represent dark and cerebral themes.
While film noir and German expressionistic films of that time were black and white due to technical limitations, Limbo is entirely black and white by choice. The character that the player controls is shown in silhouette, with his eyes being the only feature on his body that is white. While the gameplay is 2D, the layered backgrounds combined with the strong use of chiaroscuro lighting create a greater sense of depth; various assets in both the foreground and background are shown as fuzzy and out of focus in order to enhance the sense of depth, and parallax scrolling is used to enhance immersion. By placing objects and elements in the foreground in front of the protagonist, the player is often unable to see the boy; very rarely are characters hidden from the player’s sight in games that show characters from third-person perspective. Other environments are entirely in the dark, requiring the player to push on and continue moving forward despite having no idea where he or she may be going. The sound design in Limbo is also quite effective at establishing unease in the player; there are myriad animal noises, whistling wind, and other ambient sounds that aren’t tied to any visible assets. Nearly all of the sound found in the game is diegetic, though at certain points in the game, extradiegetic music plays. Generally, this music is a soft, low, sustained note, which introduces a somber tone;at other points in the game, a loud, ominous gong-like sound plays Obscuring the boy from the player’s sight and enveloping the character in complete darkness combined with the games effective sound design creates a great sense of unease as well as foreboding not often found in action-platformers.
Like Limbo, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom also borrows heavily from film noir and German expressionist films, though to different effect. The vast majority of Winterbottom is also black and white, with only the pies that P.B. Winterbottom collects and a handful of other game elements that are in color. Its character design and aesthetic combine elements of Edward Gorey’s books with various references to Tim Burton films. P.B. Winterbottom is a humorous-looking character with an over-sized top hat and exaggerated mustache, looking like a caricatured and more mischievous version of Charlie Chaplin’s famous silent film on-screen character The Tramp. Barring a few exceptions, nearly all of the levels don’t scroll due to the use of a static camera for the majority of the game. By using a static camera, the developers create another parallel to silent films; due to the infancy of the medium and technical limitations, films of that time shot footage from a static camera and simulated motion through editing. When the player records Winterbottom’s actions, the game changes its aesthetics and sound design, mimicking the filming or projection of a 8mm or 16mm film; the entire screen flickers as film projectors do, film perforations appear on the sides of the screen, and the sound of film rushing through a camera or projector is played. David Stanton, the composer for The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, composed music that was a brilliant combination of styles that includes silent film music, Danny Elfman’s film scores, and rag-time piano48. All of these features in addition to its absurdist premise create a playful yet dark tone akin to a mash-up of Charlie Chaplin’s silent films and Tim Burton.
Context and Presentation
Despite the saying that one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, it is necessary to account for how a book’s cover affects and informs a reader’s interpretation and expectations. A book cover with a scantily clad adonis with a woman would read as “romance novel” to anyone who’s spent time in a bookstore or library, so if the book turned out to be an introspective stream-of-consciousness autobiography, such a difference would throw off just about any reader. Traditional video game boxes and cases functionally act as the book cover for the game to be experienced within. Marketing departments carefully craft movie posters and video game boxes in order to ensure that audiences will be enticed by what they see, as well as to give a glimpse into the kind of experience the viewer or player will have, be it a game or movie. With downloadable games, what constitutes a “cover” becomes blurrier – a game’s art style in the Xbox Live Marketplace has to sell the fiction of the game quickly and succinctly. As computers and consoles added network capabilities, downloadable demos have become ubiquitous, though they often prove to be a double-edged sword; strong demos are capable of capturing players’ interests, and through positive word-of-mouth, are able to spread like wildfire, while weak demos can be commercial poison.
Everything that a player encounters before gameplay begins, such as title sequences, main menu art, background music, etc., while not technically gameplay, is vital in establishing the tone of the game as well as setting the player’s initial expectations. By and large the vast majority of games have a plethora of this kind of rhetoric and presentation that inherently states, “This is a game.” Through Limbo’s rejection of such presentation and features, it affords itself a more immersive ambiance. The player only encounters a single menu before beginning the game, and once the game has started, there is no use of any user interface, menus, or words, with exceptions being the main menu, the pause menu, and the use of the word “HOTEL”, found roughly in the middle of the game that I will address later. This sparseness in the use of “game language,” that most gamers are familiar with parallels much avant-garde art cinema in its rejection of creating immediately accessible and readable statements, forcing the viewer or player to draw his or her own conclusions as to what is being presented or argued. There are no tutorials that teach the player how to play the game either.
P.B. Winterbottom, on the other hand, is clearly presented as a game right from the outset. It utilizes all of the traditional markings and language of a game; it has various menus and UI features and breaks down the game into clearly marked worlds and levels that can be chosen, skipped and repeated. Once a player begins playing the game, tutorials teach the player the game’s various gameplay mechanics. During gameplay, there are also very clear UI elements that give the player information on how many clones he or she can make (which I’ll explain more later). After completing a number of levels, different modes are unlocked that include time trials or puzzles in which the player must use as few clones as possible. All of these features and designs define and frame The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom squarely as a video game.
Narrative analysis
Many films made during German Expressionism were silent films, utilizing intertitles that either presented dialogue in written word or allowed a narrator to explain context or actions that were occurring. Neither Limbo nor The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom utilized voice-over narration, but P.B. Winterbottom actually utilized intertitles to frame the context of its story.
Before each level in The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, a series of intertitles is used to provide exposition and to put each of the levels that the player plays in context. The intertitles function almost as a children’s book, as they are told in rhyme and include illustrations. The basic narrative in The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom consists of P.B. Winterbottom, the anti-hero, on a quest for all the pies in Bakersburg. After a mystical pie lures him through a portal, he suddenly has the power to manipulate time and create clones of himself. With this basic premise, the story is fairly simple; each chapter places Winterbottom in a different predicament, and each of the levels within each chapter provide some ancillary details to the conflict for the chapter. In chapter 2, “The Ticking Tarts”, the Bakersburg clock tower is broken, and as a result, the townspeople are somewhat absurdly and humorously unable to tell time. Here are some of the intertitles from chapter 2:
In Worthishman’s Tavern,
last call never came.
And the singing that followed
put bagpipes to shame.
The dogs of the town,
who were walked on the hour,
Held their bladders in check
with enormous will power.
While few of these intertitles really drive the narrative forward, they provide detail to the world while maintaining a humorous yet dark tone. The first chapter functions mostly as exposition, introducing the player to P.B. Winterbottom, while also being the gameplay tutorial. In the third chapter, “Dangerously Delicious”, a fire is ripping through Bakersburg and in Winterbottom’s quest for more pies, he manages to save the townspeople and put out the fire. Chapter four has Winterbottom running around in the sewers and underground areas of Bakersburg; this time, Bakersburg has run out of water. By the chapter five, the final chapter, Winterbottom begins to wear down the mystical pie, and the setting reveals that the Bakersburg in which Winterbottom has been running around is theater set. Throughout the course of this chapter, the mystical pie argues that by forcing Winterbottom to travel backwards in time, the pie was helping him to undo all of the damage he had done to Bakersburg. In one of the intertitles, Winterbottom is given pause and considers that perhaps he could lead a life of doing good, but he quickly returns to his one goal and concludes that he will continue to pursue pie. In the last level, Winterbottom finally succeeds in reaching the mystical pie and defeating it.
The narrative in The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom provides a simple framing for the puzzles, but it isn’t very strong on its own; Winterbottom doesn’t really evolve or learn anything as a character and no real resolution is provided regarding the fate of Bakersburg. The intertitles, however, go a long way in establishing the game’s playful and mischievous tone.
PlayDead Studios, the developers of Limbo, have refrained from giving any sort of official reading of the story outside of the simple tagline that was provided in marketing materials, “Unsure of his sister’s fate, a boy enters the unknown.” The narrative is then to be gleaned solely through the actions and events that occur in the game. The game begins with the boy waking up in the middle of the woods with forest creatures creating an eerie and disconcerting soundscape. From here, the boy then travels through various locales that begin very naturalistic and gradually become more and more technologically advanced. Almost immediately, the boy comes across a simple boat, suggesting that, at the very least, there is the existence of man, though it’s unclear how technologically sophisticated they may be. The next sign of technology in this mostly naturalistic world are animal traps that snap shut upon impact. After traversing a number of obstacles, the first living creature that the boy encounters is a monstrously large spider, almost 5 times as tall as the boy. Utilizing the animal trap to pin and cripple the spiders’ legs, the boy then proceeds to the next area where the environment makes a striking change.
In this area, the scenery shifts from a wooded area to a forest with many of its tree chopped down. The next major creature that the boy encounters at first glance is the same monstrous spider from earlier, but is in fact a mechanized and man-made spider construct. As the boy continues, there are various tree houses and suspended villages shown in the background until the boy finally encounters other human beings. When the boy first encounters them, the human beings run away. Their use of spears suggests that they might be a somewhat primitive civilization. The boy encounters various bodies impaled on spikes and hanging from trees, which suggests a savage situation reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. The next sign of technology is when the other human beings roll a burning wheel down a hill at the boy. Shortly thereafter, the boy reaches an area that is evocative of the industrial revolution; in a mine-like area, there are carts, rotating gears in the background, and various levers, pulleys, and other mechanical systems. The game then segues into the next section that is somewhat similar to a factory from the same era. Levers and pulleys are used to trigger platforms and hydraulic power pipes to lift water levels, but unlike the previous section that still had a naturalistic base terrain like grass, dirt, and rock, this section has solid ground that is clearly man-made.
After this factory-like section, the game’s one and only in-game text is shown, in the form of a neon sign that says “HOTEL”. The technological significance of the neon sign indicates that the game has shifted to an area in which electricity is now able to be harnessed by humans and widely used such as in light bulbs and signage. From here, the game proceeds to further technologically advanced areas – factories that feature gears, saws, light fixtures, and other such features. From here, the game starts to introduce game mechanics such as magnetism, flipping gravity, rotating gravity. These technological advances push towards present day and suggest a possible future where people will be able to manipulate gravity itself. The final scene in the game involves the boy flying from the technological world through a glass wall back into nature. Here he finds his sister kneeling in the grass, though it’s not clear whether she’s picking flowers or digging with her hands. Once the girl realizes that the boy is near, she sits up straight in a jolt, there is a pause of about a second, and the game ends.
Through the gradual progression and change in the environment and introduction of various technological advances, Limbo is largely an environmental allegory, with the boy representing the human civilization’s time on Earth so far. In the boy’s pursuit to continue forward, technology advances along with him, first simple tools and shelter, leading to more advances such as electricity and factories. Throughout the entire game, the world is almost always presented in a haze – the haze at the beginning of the game appears to be fog, but it turns into smoke when the boy encounters the primitive tribe. Once the boy reaches the industrial revolution areas in the game, the haze is most likely steam, and by the end of the game, the haze represents the pollution that has been inflicted upon the earth. The large spider that the boy encounters early in the game is overcome through the use of technological advancements, and shortly thereafter, the boy encounters the mechanized spider, representing humans emulating the awe and power of nature that they’ve observed. The word “HOTEL”, the only text in the game that isn’t a part of a menu, indicates the temporary nature by which humans are inhabiting this planet. Humans are only temporary residents of this planet, especially if we continue to develop technological advancements at the detriment of the environment. One critical area has the player pushing a loose gear into a mechanism which then causes the entire world to rotate around the player. By literally pushing a gear into place for the sake of advancement, both in gameplay as well as symbolically, the world is quite literally turned over upon itself, showing that human progress is changing the world. Throughout the game, there are various locations where a slug or worm of some sort drops from above and lands on the boy’s head, preventing the player from controlling the direction in which the boy will move. The boy is forced to proceed in one direction until he runs into light, which then turns him around and faces the other direction. Additionally, the only way to get rid of this brain worm is for a bird to eat it, perhaps showing that often humans have to rely on nature in order to solve their problems. Thinking about Limbo’s name, there are a number of definitions that one can look to – the theological definition states that Limbo is the outer border of Hell49, ostensibly where people go after they have died, but haven’t been sent to Hell. In following the environmental allegory, the name Limbo refers to the current state of humankind in relation to nature; humans are on the brink of entering Hell by harming the environment, and through the act of developing new technologies and destroying nature, humans are actively creating their own Hell. Ultimately, the narrative in Limbo is rife for interpretation due to its ambiguity, with its developers laying out clues in every design decision, asset, and, sound effect.
Gameplay analysis
In assessing Limbo’s gameplay, what is immediately evident is how unforgiving and difficult it is; as soon as the player learns how to move and to jump, he or she encounters a steep hillside that kills the boy if the player jumps or goes too far beyond the ledge. Shortly thereafter the player must jump over a pit of spikes, and so on. The game’s difficulty harks back to older platformers such as Prince of Persia or Another World, where they taught the player through failure, and the slightest missteps result in death. Limbo, as with the rest of its features, doesn’t utilize any sort of player-identifiable checkpoint system – the player must simply continue to proceed as far as they can to the best of their ability without knowing if halfway through a particularly treacherous level whether he or she will respawn all the way at the beginning of an obstacle.
The obstacles and puzzles that the player encounters throughout the course of the game vary in style and execution. The majority of the obstacles in the beginning of the game are somewhat simplistic in that they primarily require approaching a situation, realizing that some object kills you, and then avoiding that object after you respawn. Some of these obstacles are easier to avoid than others, but by and large the majority of these obstacles are learned simply through trial-and-error. When the player first encounters the large spider, they must approach the spider until it stabs down into the ground with one of its legs causing an animal trap to fall out of a tree. The player must then push the animal trap to a similar location underneath the spider in order to trap its leg when it stabs down. After the player has done this two times though, the third time the spider behaves differently and stabs outwardly at the player instead of into the ground. While a particularly skilled player might notice the very subtle difference in behavior before the spider stabs at the boy this third time, it’s more likely that the player would die and have to start the entire encounter from the beginning. Roughly one-third through the game, the game shifts from its learn-by-failure obstacles to more puzzle-driven platforming. While the outcome for failing to solve some of the puzzles still results in death, these puzzles require a more thoughtful approach compared to the obstacles from the beginning of the game. As an example, one puzzle has a pulley that, when the boy jumps onto a free-hanging rope on one side, lifts up a large barrier. Below the rope is an opening, though there are grinding gears that would kill the boy if the player jumps directly down. The player must pull the rope down as much as he or she can, jump off the rope and down a platform to get underneath the opening with the grinding gears and grab hold of the rope before the rope retracts above. Once the player does this, he or she can then swing to the next rope that’s attached to a pulley in order to lift a barrier next to the first barrier. Once both barriers have been lifted enough such that the boy can fit, the player must jump off of the rope and run underneath the barriers. Though this is just one example of the puzzles (and a textual description doesn’t really do the puzzle justice), all of the other puzzles in the game slowly ramp up in complexity and are all elegantly designed.
While Limbo is superbly made in its narrative, aesthetic, and game design, it doesn’t combine these elements very well and is ultimately less than the sum of its parts. It has lofty goals with regards to its narrative, but Limbo lacks cohesion in tying the puzzle-platformer gameplay with the narrative that it presents. The actions of solving these various puzzles and overcoming these obstacles never really makes sense in the context of the narrative. One of the more frequent criticisms levied against Limbo is that it doesn’t even appear to have a story. Greg Kasavin argues, “You become completely immersed in it due to the flawlessly executed art style, audio ambiance, and physics simulation, all delivered without interruption. At the same time, little story vignettes imply a greater meaning to the events that take place, a meaning you continue to search for until the game is over. […] It ends up going who-knows-where. The theme of the game gives it an “out” from a narrative perspective, in that a game about the place between life and death doesn’t need to make sense (and probably shouldn’t), and it doesn’t need to provide clear answers (and probably shouldn’t). Even still, Limbo’s narrative felt incomplete to me in a way that wasn’t entirely satisfying. […] I realized that what was pushing me forward was my search for continuity.”50 While I contend that there is a narrative, his assessment of the game is actually quite similar to my initial response, in that after the first playthrough, Limbo seems to simply be a sequence of puzzles in a set of incredibly immersive and stylistic environments, but nothing more. Kasavin later suggests that this lack of continuity in narrative is due to there being no good way to create continuity with the puzzles that the design team chose to include in the game. And while he argues that because the puzzles don’t have continuity, the game and its narrative have no continuity, I would rather present the scenario whereby the puzzles and the narrative both have continuity – it just so happens that they don’t share the same path. The puzzles stand alone in isolation from the rest of the game, resulting in a discordant play experience resulting from its ludonarrative dissonance.
Compared to the puzzles in Limbo, the puzzles in The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom are quite different, though they are just as carefully and elegantly designed. As an example in level 2-5, the player has made two clones, one on each of two see-saw platforms. In order to collect the pies, the player must jump onto the mechanized platform, which then starts a timer of a few seconds. In that time, Winterbottom and his clones must collect all of the pies on the screen – otherwise, the timer will reset and the player will need to jump on the mechanized platform again. In this particular level, the player must jump onto the mechanized platform and run onto the left-hand side of the see-saw. The clone on the lower level has been recorded to jump down on the right-hand side of the see-saw, sending the original Winterbottom up to the second see-saw. The clone on the lower level then runs to the right to collect the other two pies on that level. Once the original Winterbottom is sent to see-saw above, he lands sending the second clone to the pie above, and when the second clone lands, he sends the original Winterbottom upwards to collect the last pie.
As with Limbo, this puzzle is simply one example of the 50+ levels in the game. Once the tutorial is completed, the player then proceeds from one chapter to the next. Each chapter has variations on the mechanic – in chapter 3, “Dangerously Delicious!” only Winterbottom’s clones are able to collect the pies. In chapter 4, “Spelunking for Sweets”, the core mechanic changes again. Instead of holding down a button to record Winterbottom’s actions, the player must initiate a recording from a set location. The player has a limited amount of time in which to make the recording, and the clones are only able to manipulate other objects if the player is currently in the recording mode. Chapter 5’s mechanic requires Winterbottom or a clone to be in a spotlight in order to acquire pies. There is a set starting point for the spotlight, which is usually triggered by a switch. The player then has a limited amount of time to get Winterbottom from the spotlight to the pie. Winterbottom and his clones can also pass the spotlight from one to another and vice versa, allowing them to reach more areas. The penultimate and final levels in the Chapter 5 introduce new mechanics whereby the clones begin to have minds of their own and follow the original Winterbottom wherever he goes. The developers have made all of the levels varied in their execution, preventing the puzzles from getting too repetitious.
Contrasted with Limbo, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, features very direct tutorials at the start of the game, and the first two or three levels of each chapter are designed to be exceptionally easy in order to teach the game mechanics that will be utilized in the rest of the levels of that chapter. Through the course of each chapter, the puzzles become more and more difficult, creating a solid interest curve that gradually ramps in difficulty as the player’s skill level increases. There are a few puzzles that push on the boundaries of being overly difficult, breaking the flow of gameplay, and, at the very least, frustrating me to the point of having to walk away from the game for some time before returning and attempting to proceed. That said, by and large, the puzzles are all very well crafted, and by introducing new gameplay mechanics not simply every chapter, but every few levels, the developers keep the player on his or her toes, without letting the core mechanic get too stale. Unlike Limbo’s intentionally vague narrative, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom’s narrative is humorous and playful, but also direct and easy to follow. By keeping the narrative simple, the intertitles provide stylistic support in establishing the tone of the game and its characters, which keeps the puzzles as the primary focus, as well as avoiding the pitfalls that Limbo suffered of a conflicting story and gameplay.
Comparative analysis
In analyzing and critiquing both of these games, how the player approaches and experiences these games is important to understanding their effectiveness. Barthes wrote in “the Death of the Author” that it is both difficult as well as, perhaps, unimportant to attempt to read into what the author’s intent was with a piece of art. While this is largely true, what is presented in the work reflects the decisions that the author made, and by analyzing these decisions of what is and is not presented in the work, the author informs and directs how the player or reader experiences the work. In much the same way that many independent and art films change or play with what it means to be a film by attempting to change the standard narrative structure of a film, Limbo presents itself immediately in such a way as to suggest to the player that he or she is about to experience an avant-garde and “important” piece of art. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, on the other hand, follows many traditional game constructions by using menus, textual transitions and explication, UIs, and other standard video game conventions. By doing so, whilethis isn’t to say that The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom presents itself as “just a game,” it does actively set the expectation of the type of gameplay experience that the player is going to have. By not presenting itself as a narrative-driven game, the focus remains squarely on the puzzles, with the art style, music, and sound design all in service of the puzzle design.
Limbo, through its sparseness in explication, has a conflicting duality between its gameplay and its style and presentation. While having a character that constantly dies and respawns could be linked to the notion of Limbo, where a person is stuck in an area between Heaven and Hell, the constant death and respawning of the character is such a standard “game” construction that it doesn’t fit with the narrative. Additionally, the underlying story is at odds with the gameplay constructions. While Limbo has lofty and admirable goals and aspirations in its attempts to push the medium, it falls short of the mark due to this lack of cohesion in gameplay and narrative. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, on the other hand, by focusing on gameplay first and using intertitles for narrative and stylistic support, ultimately succeeds in creating a more satisfying and enjoyable play experience.