The Rules of Limbo

As someone who has never been a hard-core gamer I was very lost and confused when the actual game part of Limbo began. I didn’t know which controls to use or how to do anything and I definitely spent a decent five minutes sitting in front of my computer waiting for some fairy or elf character to show up and tell me what to do and at least 3 of those 5 minutes were spent wincing at the prospect of something spooky leaping out from behind a tree with the immediate effect of scaring the living daylights out of me. However, after those first five minutes were over I started pressing random buttons on my computer and eventually realized that I could make the character move. As the first episode continued I figured out how to grab stuff and move things and I was very happy to discover that Limbo is actually a very enjoyable game. Two thumbs up.

But more then that Limbo’s lack of directions for the player kind of has the effect of making the player identify with the character that goes beyond the bond created by being put in charge of the characters actions. Without directions or help of any kind, I am not only in charge of the well being of the character but also have to really think and apply real world logic in the character’s virtual world to keep the character from dying. In the few video games I’ve played there are invisible barriers and rules within the game that prevent the player from making the character do certain things. For instance in a Harry Potter game you can’t run into a pit of fire and in any game it doesn’t matter how fast you jump off of a tall building, as long as you land on “solid” ground you get to live. However, in this game I ran off the log and hit the ground at a weird angle, fell over, and died. It was tragic. The most tragic thing about it was that in real life I would know better then to take a running leap from a high place when trying to land on an angled surface, obviously that would not work and I would fall and break my ankles, and it is this knowledge about the outcome of such an action in my real world that made me feel so awful when I made the character go through with the act anyway in the virtual world of Limbo. In Limbo the player knows the rules of the game in the sense that the natural laws of our own world exist within this virtual world, it just takes a few deaths to figure this out.

Also, does Limbo have to do with the Limbo in Dante’s Inferno? From what I remember Limbo in Dante’s Inferno is a forest and this game, or at least the first episode, seems to take place in a forest.