izigame.me

What this game gets right:
This is a game about a little boy who went exploring an dark, uncanny world in search of a girl. The level of work put into this game's atmosphere is stunning, and accurately simulates the feeling of venturing around an empty, soulless world. The game hardly has any music, but when the music kicks in, the dark, industrial ambience of each song heightens the sense of emptiness and existential dread the atmosphere makes the player feel. The art style—ignoring the issues I will touch on later—forces the player to feel the anxiety and loneliness that the atmosphere creates. The dark themes of the game are quite unique: the little boy is stuck in a limbo world, and he sees other kids trying to escape this limbo world by hanging themselves, which only heightens the feelings of loneliness and dread given by the game. If I were to look at this game strictly from an artistic perspective, this would easily be one of my favorite games on Steam, but obviously since this review is negative, that's not all.

What this game gets wrong:
This may be a great example of an artistic approach to games, but the main problem is that the game is not fun. Perfect for artsy people who want a short, yet imaginative game, but not so great for people who want to enjoy their games. Here are some of the reasons why this game is not fun to play:
First, the controls are terrible. This game uses five buttons—the arrow keys and the control key. The game also doesn't let you re-map your keys, forcing you to play with the control scheme you are given, which is ridiculous. The fact that the game lacks a designated jump key makes climbing and maneuvering on ropes a complete pain. The up arrow is the jump key, and also the climb up key, which leads to trouble when you try to jump off a rope. You also cannot climb up while swinging on the rope, since pressing up at the same time as left or right will make you jump off the rope. Additionally, the controls are incredibly unresponsive, since the little boy you play as takes a long time to respond to the player's inputs, which brings me to my next point.
Second, the little boy you play as feels impossibly stiff, as if the player was controlling a sentient plank of wood. His movement is so sluggish, he may as well be submerged in molasses, which is surprising, since he cannot step into three-foot high water without drowning, even if you are one step away from being totally fine. Early on in the game, you encounter a massive spider that will attack you if you stay in the same place for too long. The spider will also knock you down if you try to pass without completing the puzzle, which would be fine if the little boy did not take an unreasonably long time to stand up. I was forced to take a death because the game developers decided that this little boy has to take a whole year to stand up. The little boy's jumps are the wimpiest jumps you will ever see in a 2D platformer, since he barely goes anywhere vertically and can barely cross any gaps horizontally. For some reason, the game developers decided that making your character take fall damage in a 2D platformer was a good idea, and even if the player falls from a survivable height, the little boy will be stunned for a short period after landing, which is enough to screw with puzzle timings or cause you to die to an obstacle. The cherry-on-top is the fact that you have practically no control over the little boy's movement in the air: you are locked into a trajectory from the instant you jump, with nothing more than a marginal speed adjustment to help with midair movement. At the very end of the game, there is a section where gravity flips on a fast, yet predictable cycle. This cycle is difficult to take advantage of, because the timing is ambiguous due to how slow the little boy is to control. If you jump slightly too early, you will either take fall damage and die, or be stunned on the ground for too long, and if you jump late, you will be dead by the time the next flip comes around. Threading that gap between too early and too late is difficult, solely because the controls are too unresponsive to provide a predictable result.
Third: the puzzles are terrible. There are definitely some good puzzles here and there, but the majority of the puzzles are either too trivial, too convoluted, or require at least one death for a first-time player to solve. Do you remember that giant spider from earlier? The way you were supposed to solve that puzzle was to see the spike trap on the tree branch to the left of the spider, then wait for the spider to slam the ground with its legs a few times so that the now off-screen trap falls down to the ground (as an additional note, those spike traps have unfairly large hitboxes). My least favorite sections of this game were the parts where the little boy had a worm implanted in his head, because during those sections, you have no control over the direction the little boy walks. The game forces you to move in one direction until hitting a ray of light to switch directions or a tentacle that will eat the worm off your head (the first time the player experiences this mechanic, the game is entirely unclear about how to remove the worm and does not tell you that the ceiling tentacles eat the worms). When the little boy has a worm on his head, if the player tries to move backward, the only effect will be that the little boy slows down, making the sections infinitely more annoying, since you cannot stop moving. There are certain totally unpredictable puzzles or jumps scattered throughout the game that essentially require a death to understand, but upon replaying the section become trivially easy, because the unpredictable aspect of the puzzle is now easily predictable. Additionally, if the player dies on one of the puzzles, the respawn that the puzzle gives you can force you to re-do sections where 90% of the gameplay is waiting for something to happen, or push boxes that you spent ages pushing to exact locations only for their positions to reset upon death, which makes certain unpredictable guaranteed-death puzzles all the more annoying.
On the subject of unpredictability: fourth, the all-black art style creates the problem of the player mixing up the interactable terrain and the elements of the background or foreground. Far too often I found myself accidentally jumping into pits because what I thought was an object or portion of the terrain was actually just a decorative foreground or background element that I went straight through. Additionally, certain puzzles require the player to interact with an object that could easily be mistaken for a decorative object. When the player is introduced to gravity-flipping mechanics toward the end of the game, there is a large jump where you slide down a slope and jump off. The first time I played through this section, I thought the goal was to precisely jump under the saw blade and catch the rope that is hanging down from the saw blade, but in reality, the solution was to see an arrow pointing right that I initially thought was a background element and interact with it to rotate gravity, because the rope I was trying to grab was not a real object.

This is a classic case of form over function. The quality of the gameplay elements does not remotely match the quality of the artistic elements. I could see a game taking the atmosphere and theme of this game and crafting a much more enjoyable experience with them, but as is, this game plays too poorly to be anything beyond mediocre. If you are looking for an artsy game and you can put up with annoying gameplay, then this game is for you. Otherwise, your money would be better spent on better 2D platformers like VVVVVV or Celeste (I recommend the latter, my favorite 2D platformer).
My Glitchwave review: https://glitchwave.com/game/limbo/review/Zassafras/89179190/