Contact Playdead s LIMBO Support

Wanted to love this game, but ended up deleting after about an hour of gameplay (before completion - no idea how long the game is). Here’s the deal: it’s gorgeous scenery and great concept, but really bad implementation. The puzzles are hard to solve without any clues or hints. It harkens back to Zack & Wiki model of try-and-die where you have to guess your way through these obstacles, jumps, pushing or pulling items you can’t even see, or else die trying and redo the whole thing over again. The controls could be fine, but lagginess means that you may or may not make that perfectly timed jump to move on. Further making things difficult are the random spikes and traps to kill you for no good reason. It’s pretty ruthless and not fun. That’s coming from a guy who loves puzzle and adventure games. Limbo is a huge miss for me. Totally overrated. Stick with Where’s my Water, King Rabbit or Plants vs Zombies.

Echoing the previous reviews that gripe about the controls - I'm on an iPhone 6s+, and there are many time sensitive and accuracy puzzles where I knew exactly what I needed to do, but had to retry dozens of times to get through because of the terrible interface. This is not challenging and fun as you develop hand-eye coordination, it's frustrating and dumb when the little guy gets stuck or stops running because the touch screen won't respond to small finger movements. And often if you have to switch directions you can't even see the kid until you lift your finger and reposition it. Replace the stupid touch-and-drag with left / right / jump buttons and this would be way more fun.

I gave this 4 stars because there is obviously a lot of effort and love that went into this game. The art is nice, though it’s kind of subtly gory. However, if don’t like the idea that the game’s physics and possibilities are never clear, and so you just end up jumping from puzzle to puzzle without knowing what you’re even supposed to do, then stay away from this game. There are no hints, and then new ways of interacting with the world are constantly being introduced. So instead of actually solving a puzzle logically, you just end up trying to figure out what the game wants your solution to be. There is only ever one solution to each puzzle even though logically you could think of multiple ways to solve it if you were the protagonist yourself in real life. That might not be a problem if the game didn’t try so hard to illicit an anthropomorphic response. So it gets kind of frustrating that instead of thinking the problem through you just end up guessing what the game expects of you.