Limbo Review: Beauty of Darkness

The interesting thing about Indie games is that they are always filled with excitement and fantasies that most videos games that themselves refer to as "modern" games lack. They achieved a lot in so little time and the trend was immediate. More and more people joined in the fun pretty soon and today, Indie games are the major players in the gaming industry. Daily, new games rise with all new stories to share and there's no end to playing them. It's almost as reading a novel as the stories are creative and exuberant.

Limbo is one such Indie game, one of the first ones indeed to have made a great entrance in the gaming industry. What's so cool about it? It's all darkness. And masterpiece is just too short to describe it with.

Limbo embraces the dark and gives you a tell-tale of fantasies filled with dreamy and contrasting real world objects. The game environment creates a wide variety of emotions in the mind of the player. There's no exact plot to Limbo and the ending is left vague. The story of limbo is like reading an open book -- your imagination is the story. But the missing of cut-scenes or a narrative won't hold you back from getting immersed in this deep and dark adventure. You write the story on the way in a manner your mind tells you to. Before writing this review, I did look upon to find an exact plot of Limbo but every one of them told a different story. So, its upto you to tell the rest of the world what the story was and no one will you hold you from telling that.

Speaking of the visuals and the audio, there's nothing missing from the puzzle here. The 2D visuals are simple yet sharp and pictures each and every detail perfectly. The game mechanics are fluid too with the chances of finding a single bug being total zero. Again, the world is darkness. It's limbo. But it cannot be just passed as being a nightmare as everything is perfect and crumbling at the same time. You go through dense forests, fallen cities and forgotten sewers. You meet people who hate you and gives you a sense of solitude while at the same time, you find hope that someone is out there looking for you and that your journey will have an ending after all. Ironically, you find yourself at the beginning in the end.

There is no music to the game in particular. The ambient sounds are the only break from silence you perceive but that too at perfectly timed intervals. Like the creaking of gears or levers or the thunderstorm that just took place. And it drives the emotions of the game to a bigger level than I've imagined.

Limbo is not a predictable journey. It's filled with amazement at the same time. The horror and beauty of the game is the same thing. It's a nightmare turned upside down into a dark fantasy of emotions. It's not just survival but about living. About not losing hopes.

The only one shortcoming I felt was the length of the journey and the difficulty. The game couldn't be solved without dying once or twice but the difficulty is not that competitive. And the non-narrative story ends pretty soon at the beginning -- maybe to repeat the same journey to give the notion of the never-ending world of limbo. The game could be improvised with its simplistic approach to visuals but with more beautiful environments. Let's hope if we get to see a new journey soon.

It's a journey that you don't want to miss. Limbo is available for multiple platforms as well as for iOS to enjoy the experience on smaller screens. And make sure you wear a headset too to get the most out of it.