rating: ★★★★1/2

Do you remember the Nintendo side-scrolling games? Do you remember Mario, Mega-Man or Castlevania? Of course you do. At least one of these timeless classics has probably earned its rightful place in your childhood.

Now imagine you are playing one of those treasured titles, except you are completely stripped of your weapons, you can only jump about three feet high and you can only see in black and white. Mostly black. Did I mention there are glow-worms that burrow into your head and make you run off cliffs?

Scary-eyed boy tries to save sister, dies by giant spider attack instead.

Wait, let me start over. The indie game we are looking at here is Limbo, a simple yet gripping 2D puzzle-platformer created by Danish developer Playdead and released in July 2010. Just glancing at its spooky, voiceless trailer (and considering it has won more game awards than I knew existed) offers more than enough reason to give it a look.

The game opens in a dark forest, entirely black and white, and seen through a pulsating, flickering grain like a film noir or German Expressionist dream sequence. You wake up here as a small boy who appears only as a silhouette, apart from your beady glowing eyes. Almost everything else in your environment is, like you, a mere shadow, and the background is painted an eerie grey blur.

Aside from the creepy minimalist soundtrack, all you can hear is the unnerving ambiance of a forest: crickets, creaking trees and the pitter-patter of your feet. Already you are submerged in a surreal, disturbing atmosphere swathed in darkness, leaving much to the imagination.

The game is rather scant on details, but your goal is to find your lost sister. It is not clear why she is missing or why, in order to find her, you must tread through a vast landscape littered with bear traps, pits-of-spikes, giant spiders and other children trying to kill you, but if we never asked these questions about Mario surely we can go with the flow here as well.

Your only defences against the above threats are your wits and dexterity as you move boxes, pull levers, activate water pipes and essentially turn traps against your enemies to overcome your brutally hostile surroundings.

The puzzles are fairly simple once you know where to look — and listen. The game gives a few hints early on about how to make use of its impeccable sound effects to compensate for what little you can see, adding an interesting dynamic to a genre largely dominated by bright lights and neon signs telling where the player to go.

Despite this, one notable way in which Limbo is very similar to retro games is this: you will die. You will die a lot. Playdead even took pride in what they called its “trial and death” play style, hearkening back to an age of more difficult yet more rewarding platformers.

Unlike older platformers, however, Limbo does not punish you through points or lives, as it even offers checkpoints generously close to your place of death. The real penalty for death in Limbo is a punch to your sense of empathy. Despite Limbo‘s fairly plain graphics, the variety of gruesome and horrific deaths your character can (and will) suffer invoke not only shock value but deep sympathy for the helpless, faceless, speechless little protagonist, urging you to do better next time or witness yet another mangling.

Does it work? After watching the poor boy drown in a pathetic, flailing mess for the ninth time, I can safely say yes. Yes, it does. If by the end of this game you are not a better gamer, you will at the very least be a braver one. If you are too traumatized to reach the end of this game, you probably have a soul and should go buy a puppy.

On a more sobering note, though I have likely been spoiled by newer, easier, more mainstream games, I did find that in a few of Limbo‘s puzzles it was only after about ten minutes of “trial and death” when I found, by total accident even, what the next step was.

The whole game being in black and white does result in some puzzle objects being blurred in with the rest of the foreground, making the exercise occasionally feel more like a terrifying stumble in the dark than a puzzle. Whether this adds to the game experience or subtracts from it may depend entirely on the kind of games you play. Nonetheless I suspect even the most casual gamer will feel compelled to solve each puzzle and feel handsomely rewarded for it. By rewarded, I of course mean that you live to see the next puzzle.

On the whole, Limbo feels like a nightmarish traipse through your childhood backyard or playground, with innocent familiarities such as tree-houses and tire swings contrasted with deranged, expressionist depictions of child-like fears, from spiders to drowning to clubs of rival neighbour kids.

Though later on you do move into an urban environment, your surroundings are always dark, silent and unforgiving, and like a child you feel frightened, alone and vulnerable. If you persevere against all odds, however, this four-hour game will leave you with a sense of triumph most games take twice as long to achieve. Just watch out for the brain-burrowing glow-worms.

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Photo: Supplied