Limbo review

So all you can do is say goodbye and move on, and while this is a victory in terms of the game's rules, it's a painful one. Maybe your companion is out there, though, so you keep going.

Nowhere is this drive forward more stark than at a point where you must use another child's corpse as a footbridge over a pond. The other boy was just like you, except that he didn't make it, and you've still got a fighting chance. There's no "moral choice" that allows you to take a more easily digestible route. Nor does your character wring his hands in sorrow so that everybody watching knows what a sweet kid he is - there's not a single overwrought moment in this game. You simply drag the corpse to the spot where your feet need to go, and thus "win" this section.

Most of the puzzle-solving epiphanies are more delightful than that one. And while the challenges vary in difficulty, none of them are especially obtuse, thanks to Limbo's clear and concise visual language. Generous checkpoints are there to catch your every failure, so dying is relatively inconsequential. Which is not to say it's meaningless. Each death is framed with a two-second moment of silence. Yes, you're going to get up and keep moving ahead, but that one little version of the boy deserves his moment of mourning.

Because they weren't placed by a single all-important antagonist, each puzzle has a bit of implied back-story to it. Some of the obstacles are clearly set up with intent, like the gang's traps and a spider's sticky snare. Others are just part of the wasting world, like a hotel sign whose huge neon "H" buzzes with deadly electricity. Taken together, these pieces of history don't add up to anything specific; they haunt you with the outlines of a world that went down a gradual, inexorable path of decay.

The game only disappoints in its third act, which twists through a factory replete with buzzsaws and laser-triggered machine guns. Limbo feels like it's above those familiar genre gadgets, and for most of its three-hour playing time, it avoids them. The factory is a dissonant exception. To be sure, the game is engrossing to the finish, and it builds to a beautifully understated ending. In that last hour or so, it's just somewhat more standard.

The trouble is that Limbo strays from the personal touch at its soul. One of its sweetest surprises came in the first couple seconds of play. I hit the jump button, and when my character landed, the controller vibrated. It's mild, yet it says a lot. It says that this is just a boy, not a futuristic robot or a genetic-freak hedgehog, so when he hits the ground with both feet, he feels it. And you do, too, by way of a lopsided motor in the Xbox 360 controller. With one touch (literally), the black silhouette on screen struck me as a full-bodied person.