Limbo

Original thread is gone.

Hitting PSN.

And PC too!

Bumpage. I learned about this game because my favorite You Tube star, Tobuscus, started playing it. Surprisingly, he's pretty good at it, given the fundamental simplicity (meaning he doesn't have to keep a complicated plot in his ADD-addled brain) and the fact that it's designed to kill you multiple times before you learn how to do stuff, which comes to Toby quite naturally.

If he inspires me to buy it, it'll be the fifth game I've bought through watching his Lets Plays.

edited 17th Feb '12 12:50:17 PM by Fighteer

Been playing it.

Wonderful game. Reality looks so amazingly comfortable, inviting and happy in comparison. It's the only game I've ever played where I emerge back to the real world, and feel happy and content about my life.

I just wish I understood what the hell it is about.

It's about childhood-themed grim darkness. The Primal Fear stuff of a child's nightamres. Including violent social rejection.

Or a story about a child in Limbo.

Or a story about a jilted lover.

or a story about suicide.

Or a story about a brother and a sister.

Or a story about etc etc etc

The retro-noir theme that Limbo has seems to be a clue. For one, almost all the tech and scenery involved look like it's from the 1930s -1950s, and much of it is extremely hazardous to be around. Even the children's playgrounds are dangerous, with spike traps, burning tires, poison darts, spears, etc. Also, the boy seems to drown unusually quick - you don't even have to be in neck-deep water before he starts struggling in the water and dies.

So my guess is that while the boy likely died by drowning and has a phobia of water, he was also being used as child labor in an industrial factory and picked on by other kids, all of which appear in his own purgatory - or Limbo. And making contact with his sister one last time, despite the likelihood she's still alive, is his last task before he is freed from Limbo and his spirit can move on.

What of the Hotel

Son of a Whore, like in Monster and Watchmen?

Poor kid.

Such a grimdark backstory seems very much at odds with how low-key the game is about itself.

I can see the setting resemblance to the 1940s-50s, but the personal details lack substance. (Also, child labour had been abolished by then.) I think it seems more like the representation of things the boy's parents would have been (silently) afraid of on his behalf - he seems pretty oblivious to danger himself.