Games club end: A retrospective on Limbo by Sean B.

This year's Summer of Arcade from Xbox LIVE has been packed full of satisfying titles, including a heavy dose of nostalgia from games like Castlevania: Harmony of Despair and Hydro Thunder Hurricane. Regardless of their success and popularity, one has stood out in front of the others, both as an innovative platformer and as a first submission from a new studio in town. The title is LIMBO from Playdead, a game of searching, puzzle solving and survival.

As you take your first steps through the dark and obviously gloomy setting LIMBO has to offer, one of the first things you'll probably ask yourself is "what in God's name am I doing in this place, and how in the hell did I get here?" All you really know is that you're looking for your sister, and she's lost somewhere in this horrible purgatory of darkness. As you set out on your adventure, there's no limit to what you'll find. That's one of the greatest things about this game, toying with your curiosity within the first few minutes of playing, also discovering that anything and everything could be your undoing. Traps, elements, potential savages from who knows where, there's really no telling what you'll encounter or how you'll handle it the first time around. In some instances, I even found myself being scared shitless - or at least freaked out to the point of checking my own darkened room or giant spiders before bed.

As the first hit from a studio comprised of two obviously talented individuals, I think I speak for a great deal of gamers when I say that LIMBO is pure genius. Each and every puzzle has you guessing what's going to be around the next shadowy corner, especially since the only way to solve most of them is by dying first. And to add insult to a great deal of injury, each death is more gruesome than the last, forcing you to either drop your jaw or chuckle out loud (depending on who you are) every time you see the poor kid get maimed on the screen. One tip I'll even give to newbies, don't go thinking he actually knows how to swim.

There's almost no limit to who or what can kill you in the world of LIMBO. If it weren't for the title of the game, I'd go as far as thinking this were hell as opposed to the shadowy cracks and crevices in between. No, this is an imaginative portrayal of a lost world of those who may have once had souls, a world of absolute chaos and darkness, a world of utter nothingness that can only be described as LIMBO itself.