Games: Limbo
Limbo is a puzzle platformer with a dark aesthetic (spoilers below). It has a monochromatic colour palette while the entire screen is rendered through a grainy film filter. You assume the role of what appears to be a boy: its silhouette is grey while its eyes emit light. This is all you know about your character.
It is not clear where you are and what exactly is happening to the world around you. You wake up in the middle of some indeterminate place and must walk to another location. Even completing the game does not tell you much of what is going on. The ending leaves everything open to interpretation. There is no dialogue or any hint you can read on. Just unending darkness.
Limbo is all about the gameplay and its attendant vibes. The actions you may perform are basic directional motions and a single jump. There are no power-ups or tools you may acquire. Beside your innate motions, you can interact with some objects in the environment to solve puzzles, such as to push a crate around or pull a lever.
Each section represents a single puzzle. Solving it allows you to progress to the next section. The problems you are confronted with require both situational awareness and well-timed execution of actions. In other words, you will die a lot until you figure out what to do.
The Limbo gameplay revolves around the idea of trial and error. A small miscalculation and your life is forfeit. You respawn at the point where the puzzle starts, which typically means that you are only a few steps behind where you stopped. Dying is the means through which you learn about the requirements of each puzzle.
This loop of death and rebirth as a vehicle for learning is a fecund metaphor for how we recalibrate our corpus of knowledge. As we are exposed to new information, the now incompatible part of us must be left behind: it cannot form part of the new world. To err in honesty, and to become aware of our mistakes, is to liberate ourselves from the grip of the given falsehood. Those who are afraid to make mistakes, those who do not admit to any wrong, those who choose to only show a boutique view of their self, are not going to progress to the next “puzzle” because they refuse to go through the cleansing baptism of fire that is trial and error.
Limbo executes its ideas well. The atmosphere is consistently eerie, the environment remains unwelcoming throughout, the mechanics are precise, and the puzzles are smart. It is a nice experience all around.