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PlayDead's soon-to-be-released title Limbo is short. In fact, it is the shortest console game I've ever played. It took me just over one hour to finish. The press and the public — myself included — have made quite a lot of Limbo's strong art design, but I feel like length may, in this rare instance, be an issue that trumps quality and defines the game. I am hesitant to discount my overall reaction to an experience based on how long it lasts. Mirror's Edge leaps to mind as a title that many people criticized as too brief, and I enjoyed that game immensely.
The difficulty, of course, is pinpointing where exactly value comes from. The simplest metric — and the most widely used — is length. Perhaps Limbo's value lies elsewhere.
Length as a measure of worth
Before I move on to other possible value gauges for Limbo, I have to say that based on the metric of length, I think Limbo is an abject failure. More than that, it presents what is quite possibly the single largest value quandary I've ever experienced. After finishing the game, my initial response was a mix of stunned incredulity and mild anger. The ending is very abrupt and feels unearned — not to mention dissatisfying — and the adventure itself seems like an abridged version of a longer title. More simply, Limbo feels like a really extravagant demo.
Limbo's central design philosophy doesn't do it any favors either. One long, side-scrolling level comprises its entirety. Unfortunately, PlayDead decided to prevent the environment from expanding nearly every time you finish a puzzle: You'll slide down unclimbable hills, watch as the platform you were just standing on drops out of the screen, and run from monsters that prevent you from going left. This means that the bounds of the screen almost always contain all of the necessary components to complete Limbo's myriad puzzles. It would have been nice to see them include a few more expansive, multiscreen elements. Instead it inexorably plows to the right. Since Limbo only has two buttons, and the tools are always right in front of you, none of the challenges are particularly difficult. The game didn't stump me once, and the only brain teasers that presented any trial whatsoever were those that required timed platforming.
Of course, it bears mentioning that Limbo isn't a full-priced game. It's one of Microsoft's $15 Summer of Arcade titles. But to give some measure of perspective, I recently saw Christopher Nolan's new film, Inception, at the movie theater for $11. It is an excellent film, and it's two times as long as Limbo. This means by one specific metric, it's twice a good a Limbo, right? Of course, quantitatively comparing like this illustrates what is so silly about judging a game based soley on its length.
Novelty as a measure of worth
Perhaps then, a better metric is originality. Fortunately, Limbo deserves a bit more praise in this department. Its puzzles, while somewhat simple, do display impressive variety when you consider that game has only a “run” button and an “action” button. This is mostly thanks to a well-crafted physics engine that keeps the world feeling substantial and allows PlayDead to insert all sorts of environmental play sets for you to toy with.
Not everything is wholly new. The overall presentation — as opposed the more granular aspects of its art design — feels lifted from previous side-scrolling gems like Braid, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and Trine. Limbo's world, and how the puzzles fit into it, exhibit an organic sensibility that owes a great debt to those titles. (As a side note, when taken as an aggregate, these titles are starting to feel like a somewhat-hard-to-define subdivision of the platforming genre.)
To be fair, I would offer that originality isn't necessarily the best way to ascribe merit to a game, anyway. A title like Noby Noby Boy is wildly original, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's worth playing. Novelty's only real value is in how fun it is, and oftentimes it is preferable to have a high-functioning copycat in lieu of a poorly executed stroke of genius.
Charm as a measure of worth
This brings me to the most ineffable quality of Limbo: its charm. What is charm? How do you create it? Where do you find it? While establishing a template for what makes a charming game is very probably an impossible task, I can tell you what is charming about Limbo — and also that this argument is the strongest reason to play it.
Limbo's main character, an unnamed boy, fights his way though a world that is irresistible. When it's not oppressively spooky, it's downright macabre. But buried somewhere in its dismal presentation is a kernel of delight and magic. It's the same sense of wonder hiding deep in the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, which ostensibly influenced the developers — Andersen and PlayDead both hail from Denmark.
Despite its somewhat derivative mechanics, Limbo is, at its core, a bona fide original. It's a melancholy and capricious affair — two qualites sorely lacking in bigger-budget games. It's black and white tones are full of wondrous — and sometimes revelatory — discoveries, and what it lacks in the stress of difficulty it more than makes up for with fraught atmosphere.
The only other games that I can conjure that even vaguely resemble Limbo are Rogue Entertainment's American McGee's Alice and Tale of Tales' The Path. I feel that people should laud Limbo more highly than either of these titles because it presents an entirely new fairy tale that is at once both strikingly familiar and disconcertingly alienating. With its neon hotel signs and electrified rails, it's its own little slice of modern folklore. And that, more than anything, goes a long way toward mollifying my worries about its length.
I cannot recommend or discourage the purchase of Limbo because in the end, I'm still somewhat ambivalent toward it. My advice would be to look inward and examine what constitutes a valuable experience for you. And don't worry: A wrong answer to this question doesn't exist.