Limbo is probably best described as a puzzle platformer. It's easy to draw comparisons between this game and Braid, but that's really taking the easy way out of the review process. Limbo is its own right a beautiful, great, albeit very short, game. I sat down this morning to start playing sometime around 11, and finished at about 1:30, giving you an idea of how short it really is. But in the end, it was a mostly satisfying play experience.
Along with the normal platformer mechanics, there's three types of puzzles in the game, "push this object", "throw this switch" and "make this jump". Even with this limited pool, the puzzles presented are very clever, and I found myself laughing at myself for making a silly mistake. Laughter over wanting to throw my controller is always a good thing.
That's not to say that there weren't a couple frustrating parts. One part in particular towards the end doesn't teach you about a new twist on a mechanic without letting you plummet to your death over and over again. Now that I've played through it once, I think I could get through it again and maybe snag the achievement of completing it in one sitting and dying less than four times, but it would still be pretty difficult.
I do have a small complaint about the ending, in that it doesn't even offer to explain anything. It presents you with a scene that it has shown you briefly a couple other times earlier in the game, and then doesn't explain what it is or why its important. I can interpret it all I want, but I'd really like to know what the game designers were intending it to mean without having to go read interviews or the like.
Going through the game, I only had a 78% completion rate, and from what I saw on the leadership boards it goes up to 125%. I also only got 2 achivements for the game, leaving me to believe there's a lot that I missed.
So in the end, is it worth picking up? It's hard to say. If you like these polished independent games, then it's definitely worth a play through. It's a bit on the pricey side at 1200 points, but if you're planning on picking up any of the other Summer of Arcade games and taking advantage of their Free Points offer for buying multiple games, then you can't really go wrong here. If not, wait for it to drop in price and pick it up then.
