Limbo

There's a spider scuttling among the ceiling.  A completely normal spider, with eight legs and a face no mother could love.  Except that it's ten times your size, and peckish.

(Aragog?)

Welcome to Limbo, where the world really isn't fair.

(Just chilling on the swing)

Having mentioned the return of games where deep thinking is key, it makes sense to go a little bit more into how this came about.  And one of the ways that it seems to have happened is through the platformer genre attempting to reinvent itself.

Endless Mario repetitions get dull after a while, but for a time it seemed that the only platforming games to come out of the big developers were rehashes of old and established franchises; The Prince of Persia, or Tomb Raider.  It seems almost odd that they would be so risk averse, and in retrospect they should have seen the way forward easily.

As is often the case, indie developers led the way.  And services like Steam meant that if an indie game took off, everyone noticed it.

It started with Braid, which mixed traditional platforming with a variety of time-travelling puzzles practically guaranteed to twist your mind like wringing a wet cloth.  Sooner or later you'd think of the solution, and feel like all those days of thinking you were smart may not have been completely untrue.  There was immense payoff.

Other games followed: There was And Yet It Moves, where you can turn the game world upside down, only to die a lot.  And then there was Limbo, which managed to make puzzles feel natural, brutal, and cruel.

Limbo succeeds because it is such an unrepentant work of art.  The atmosphere is grey, steady, and often frightening.  The gigantic head-munching spiders are iconic, but there are a host of other enemies ready to murder and brutalise the small child you play.  And it's a helpless child too - it can survive only on wits and agility.  There are no weapons to lessen the tension, as in Tomb Raider.  You really are on your own.

(Well, there's him.  The dead guy.  Teddy?)

 

In the days of the Steam Autumn sale then (whoop!), pick up Limbo for a dark night.  It's not true horror, and it's not too challenging.  But it was a step in the right direction for games, integrating satisfying mental challenges without killing the fun of making progress.  And, indirectly at least, it helped turn the industry back towards puzzles that weren't just when to take cover.