LIMBO (Nintendo Switch) Review

Can you help a poor young lad try to find his sister? Really? How kind! Simply guide him from left to right and she will be within touching distance soon enough. Easy peasy. Ah, well, not quite. There is always a catch, right? In this case it is that everything in LIMBO is working against the young lad, from a horrid spider trying to spear him early on, to bear traps treacherously lying around, other kids firing poison darts at him, precarious jumps, whizzing buzz-saws ready to rip him to shreds, mind-warping worms that lead him Lemming-like off ledges, rising water to swallow him up, and much, much more…

This is no mere simplistic side-scrolling runner, nor is it a gentile platform escapade. LIMBO will test your mettle on a regular basis, managing to amaze at every turn. It delivers style and class in spades - be it from the ingenuity of the scenarios the boy must face, to the macabre atmosphere exuding from every pore, thanks to an eerie soundtrack and black-and-white visual appearance. Death will befall the lad on a regular basis, but checkpoints are extremely frequent, so it makes attempting specific tasks repeatedly frustration-free.

LIMBO is such a highly streamlined and tight package, full of great controls and an abundance of ambience, so it is no surprise it is often cited as a source of inspiration for newer games taking that darker side of presentation. There may be times where the gameplay seems unfair, but there is never anything that cannot be overcome with a little bit of lateral thinking. Die, die, die again…and then succeed, with a massive sense of achievement afterwards. More story would have been a pleasant addition, and the ending is rather too abrupt, but what is here is still plenty enjoyable, and when some of the death traps can start to be used against other potential threats, the creativity of LIMBO shines bright to the point of not really caring about an in-depth tale.