Limbo: what it all means

There's this conversation piece by the good folks at Rockpapershotgun.com on different takes on Limbo. It's a nice read and it illustrates how the game mechanics and design combine to let the developer make a point about the behavior of the player.

(Some "spoilers" at the end, they will be dully signposted but really, either you're going to play the game or not, and if you are undecided, you should play it)

The interesting thing to me, however - and one of the great merits of interactive storytelling, in my opinion - is that I got a very different feeling about the theme and overall point of the game during my play-trough.

In the RPS piece, John argues that the games left-to-right, trial and error nature is subtly trying to make a point about what the player will put up with so that he can navigate from left to right, even though he has no discernible purpose for doing so.

This is an interpretation fundamentally based on game mechanics, and it paints a picture I had not considered - that of Limbo as a commentary on the player.

My own take on it was first and foremost based on the expectation brought on by the name. Limbo. You can write hundreds of pages on the theological and mythological meaning of the world, and a different cultural perspective might bring in yet another interpretation, but to me, the word evokes kind of hell, a place where lost souls wander waiting for redemption - it is a purgatory, a place between salvation and damnation.

This interpretation fits quite nicely with the game's aesthetic. Everything has a dark, edgy, menacing feeling to it, and our small character has an innocent, but ghost-like, feeling to it. 

Here the arbitrary death and trial-and-error mechanics make a lot of sense, and the mostly generous check-pointing fits in as well: where John saw a game about teasing the player, I see a game about punishment. 

The world and its masters are making the boy suffer death after death, rewinding time after each one but keeping his memory of the events intact, that he might keep suffering them over and over until he overcomes them, one step closer to redemption.

[discussion about the ending follows: consider this a spoiler alert]

And then it ends, in a final, magnificent jump that shatters the boundaries of the boy's hell. Or does it? 

After that final jump, he finds himself in a pristine meadow, no aggression in sight, in the company of a ghost-like girl, much similar to him. And then the game ends. But there's a twist...

Finally we get to understand that weird title screen, that meadow with two fly-ridden corpses. That meadow exactly like the one in the end, where the children were standing at the spots corpses now reside. The game has come full-circle, and opened a lot of possibilities for interpretation.

Was the girl the final test, after all the hellish traps, a siren to finally ensnare the boy into eternal damnation?

Was it the final redemption, after the hero's journey of the boy's soul, the reunion of two souls that were separated by a tragic death at that spot?

Or was it something altogether more cruel, a true hell for the boy's soul, a never-ending circle of finding his princess and then being taken back to the beginning, forced to forever face the same challenges for the same result, for eternity? And here we have it again - commentary on the nature of games and the player.

This is my take on Limbo - I don't think I will ever be sure about what the ending means to me - maybe that's the point, maybe it will mean different things in different stages of my life. It's ambiguous narrative will forever be subject to each individual's cultural and intellectual perception of the world.

What is your take on it?

And Yet it Sucks - a belated opinion on the electronic game "And Yet It Moves"

Indie games are weird. Not always, mind, but most of the time. Some times they are pretty little things with a very artsy look and everyone - professional reviewers, forumites, youtube superstars, etc - eats them up and myopically praises them for advancing the medium as an art form. But do they really?

Thanks to the Steam Addiction Month, I played through such a game, And Yet It Moves, one that I remember the internet raving about as a work of beauty. Now, far removed from the wave of hype and praise, I kept wondering where did that experience exist to begin with.There's much to be said about building a complex game full of emerging possibilities from simple rules. AYIM gets half of that right. 

You move left or right, you jump, and you rotate the world. Falling accelerates you, and if you pick up too much speed you get splattered upon landing. Here lies my first problem with it. The acceleration mechanic seems arbitrary. Throughout all the ten stages, I could never get a sure handle on how far I could make myself fall and survive. Sometimes all it took to pick up too much speed was turning the world a couple of times mid-jump, while in some other circumstances large falls went unpunished. In fact, a good deal of the game was trial-and-error play.

And there is very little in the way of complexity emerging from simple rules. The game only truly finds its feet on the last third, and more because of it finally upping the challenge a bit, rather than allowing us to discover new stuff to do with the main mechanic. 

Now, of course it looks nice. The paper art style is quite unique and charming, and the few narrative elements are suitably subjective - to me, the white paper sprite's quest to find and merge with the piece of white paper at the end of each stage was a quest to belong, maybe a metaphor for returning home. Beautiful stuff, yes, but it could do with a bit less boring game. I really get the feeling that, first time around, this game got a free pass on account of the artfulness it exhibits. 

It was fun, yes, but only after a slog through two thirds of the game. It is pretty, charming even, and made by a small team that tried something new, plus it is a cheap game, but none of these reasons will magically make a boring game good. There are plenty of innovative, artful indie games that are fun - or scary, or introspective, or whatever they aim to make the player feel -  from start to finish; this is just not one of them.I score it a couple of oranges and a peach.