Limbo Review (Captain Moo Moos)
This is a rather long review, so if you want a summary of why I recommend this game skip to Results and read from there.
Playdead games strikes gold with the hit title LIMBO. LIMBO is a game which keeps you guessing with interesting puzzles, complex scenarios, and an intriguing story. The games artistic styling’s does not seem cheap, but rather creates an ambience that makes LIMBO seem rather elegant.
Summary:
LIMBO is a side scroller where you play a young boy who is on an adventure to seek his missing sister. The game is a platform game with integrated puzzles to solve in order to progress through to the next part of the game. The grey-tone of the game creates a rather fearful and discerning environment where a gruesome fate looks poetic. The game gets progressively harder and the puzzles become more challenging as you progress, although once you get a hang of the game you'll figure out it’s not too difficult. You meet many challenges along the way from rising water levels, monsters that force you in a direction, rope swinging, traps, and more that keep you on your toes. LIMBO is a great game which offers fantastic yet horrific scenery, music, and ambience. The game keeps you on your toes and the clever grayscale art style allows a rather terrifying world to be poetic.
Controls:
My major gripe about this game was the control system. Although, I write a lot about this, it is actually a rather minuscule problem and doesn't at all ruin the games experience. You cannot edit the controls from inside the game, because the developers decided not to allow key-mapping within the games interface you must exit the game and edit the settings file within the LIMBO steamapps folder. The controls are worse because the jump command which is listed in the settings file is not an actual command in the game; there are only five commands: Left, Right, Up, Down, and Use. There are no resolution settings, so if you are using an odd resolution you may have problems playing this game. The one complaint I have towards this game is that character doesn't always respond well to the controls, which causes a lot of deaths that could easily be avoided if the character control system was better.
Gameplay Hints:
>When you get a brain slug running under the light allows you to turn the other direction.
>The "up" key (mine was W) is not a jump key, it moves you up and coincidently this means you jump with it. When gravity field reverses you must use the "down" key (S) rather than "up" key (W) to jump as you are moving down.
>Do not hold the "up" key while on a rope as if you do clicking the "left" or "right" key will jump you off the rope. If you are not holding the "up" key then you will just swing left and right gaining momentum.
Results:
Overall this game is a fun, the puzzles are challenging, difficulty curve is smooth, scenery is fabulous, ambience is frighteningly amazing, gameplay is elegant, and the symbolism makes the story phenomenal. I would completely recommend this game. I purchased it at a discount, but if I knew it was this fun I would have paid full price.
Pros:
+Amazing environment
+Great level design
+Challenging puzzles
+Mysterious and freaky ambience
+Fun achievements
+Great checkpoint system
+Beautiful story
+Not too long, but not too short
+Very fun secret achievement
Cons:
-No key mapping within the actual game
-No resolution settings
-Poor character control (it is not too bad once you get used to it, but at first its hard to get used to)