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I'm not going to take up your time today to tell you what I thought of Limbo; if you want to know how I would review it, you can just read either of Mitch Krpata's pieces about it (1 / 2) as they say almost word-for-word what I would have said if it was my job to review games. Instead, I want to examine Limbo from a game design standpoint. I feel that the game fails pretty dramatically from a gameplay standpoint, but I'm not interested in just listing reasons that I didn't like it. Instead I want to use Limbo as a learning tool, a way to demonstrate some ideas about game design - and especially puzzle game design - that I find to be particularly important.
I'm going to look at four particular areas here: the importance of clear/coherent rules, the importance of clues, the importance of respecting the player, and the necessity of context.
Lesson 1 - Rules Are Important
Limbo kills the player frequently. A great many of these deaths could only be avoided with prescience, dumb luck, or superhuman reflexes. A game in which the player character dies frequently is not necessarily bad, but one in which the player character dies because of poor communication most definitely is.
Communicating the structure and rules of a game is of vital importance. Imagine trying to play a game of Risk without knowing that the defender (typically) rolls less dice than the attacker; imagine trying to play a game of Tetris without knowing that filling up an entire line clears that line from the screen. You would figure it out eventually, sure, but it basically renders the game you've played up until that point useless, since the real beginning of the game is the point at which you actually understand what's going on.
Limbo takes this one step further though by constantly changing the rules. Imagine that you've decided to attack an opponent in Risk because you know the numerical advantage favours you. You win the first battle, but your opponent still has troops left so you attack again. Only this time, after you've declared your attack, an observer suddenly informs you that on this roll, the defender gets extra dice. Limbo has a puzzle that does exactly this - two identical looking platforms just a few feet apart operate in entirely opposite fashions; one of these platforms will kill you if you step on it so you must jump over it, while the platform a few feet away will kill you if you don't step on it.
Lying to the player and arbitrarily changing rules is not clever, it is cheating. Games are about rules; they are about players learning those rules, and how they affect the structures within which the player must work, and then figuring out how to apply those rules to achieve some sort of desired result. Arbitrary rules may work well for a prank (see: the quite funny Mornington Crescent) but they are the death knell of good gameplay. Rules are what hold a game together. Without them, you just have a bunch of unrelated experiences stuck together by a similar aesthetic.
This is not to say that mechanics can not be changed part-way through the game. Braid changes one major rule in every single world. There are two key differences though. The first is that Braid explicitly tells you when you have changed rules with the introductory puzzle in each level, which is a simple demonstration of the new idea. The second is that within each world, the puzzles all build on that idea. Once you have learned what the idea is, the remaining puzzles require you to apply that idea in varying, often challenging ways.
My criticism is also not meant to say that there's anything wrong with throwing new things at players. Metal Gear Solid 4 packs in more gameplay ideas in each of its five chapters that most games do in their entire running time. But with a few exceptions for minigames, these ideas all operate within a defined, understood, and consistent set of mechanics and logic, which means that the player is able to learn how to accomplish later tasks by understanding and completing previous ones.
[Good] Puzzles Have Clues
This is a personal pet peeve of mine, one that applies to many games other than Limbo, but one which is drawn into especially sharp relief by Limbo's arbitrary shifts of logic. A puzzle should be made up primarily of two things: a defined goal, and clues as to how that goal might be achieved. Sometimes figuring out what the goal is is itself a puzzle, and that's OK, but in that case there should also be clues to point the player in the right direction and it should absolute be clear that there is a puzzle.
Limbo frequently ignores this basic premise of puzzle-solving, largely through its constant unexplained changes in logic and mechanics, but also by frequently killing the player with little or no warning. There is very rarely any information anywhere on screen that would indicate to the player what might or might not work. The only way to solve most of the "puzzles" in the game is to die at them, often several times. This is partly a mechanics issue, in that the game often asks for a level of precision that I found unfair, but it is also a puzzle design issue in that the player must typically just keep trying different things until they stop dying.
This all goes back to communication, something that Limbo is either unwilling or incapable of engaging in. Perhaps some of the best examples of how a puzzle is done right can be found in the original Myst, which I count among my favourite games. Everything that happens in Myst makes sense, partly because the world is consistently logical, but also because, so long as the player is thorough and attentive, the game almost always provides them with enough information to solve the puzzle.
One of the earlier, simpler puzzles from Myst as an example: there is a spaceship that the player needs to enter, however it appears to be unusable in its current form. The player notices the first clue, that there is a wire running from the ship to another location on the island. Following the wire, the player reaches a device with various buttons to interact with. Pressing these buttons, the player sees that each one adds a specific amount of voltage to the machine. This clues the player in to exactly what they are trying to do, which is provide enough voltage to power the ship. The game reinforces this by blowing a breaker if the player puts too much power in (which the player must then find and reset).
But how to know what is the right amount of power to provide? Brute forcing the solution could work, but it might take a while. Luckily, the attentive player has earlier found an item which indicates that at some point they will need to set a device to 59 volts. Putting all of these clues together, it only takes a brief amount of time to do the arithmetic and get the machine running.
This is perfect puzzle design - the player finds an objective, finds the puzzle which will complete the objective, and combines clues found in various locations with some logical thinking in order to come to the desired result. By making it clear at all times what the player is trying to do and by not hiding critical information, they are able to determine the correct course of action and are unlikely to spend time chasing after fruitless ideas in the hopes of eventually hitting upon something that works.
A number of other games have done this well. The riddles in Silent Hill 2 & SH3 are well crafted, as are the puzzles of the Professor Layton games. The keys are to let the player know what the objective is and then give them clues to put together.
Lesson 3 - Respect The Player
This is a lesson that I think is best exemplified in the approach of two designers - Sid Meier and Jonathan Blow. The first part comes from Sid Meier of Civilization fame, and I think it's an extremely important point to keep in mind during game development. One of Sid's rules is that "The Player Should Have The Fun, Not The Designer Or The Computer" (see: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/23458/Analysis_Sid_Meiers_Key_Design_Lessons.php).
Limbo often seems to be going in the opposite direction. While playing I frequently got the feeling that the people making the game sat around trying to come up with ways that would be interesting for them to kill the player character. I constantly felt like I was being killed not because it improved the game for me in any appreciable way, but because the developers wanted to show off.
I felt the same way about the puzzles and the fact that the game was constantly introducing new rules and ideas for no apparent reason. Why does the last 1/5th of the game rely on gravity switching puzzles? What do those puzzles have anything to do with the parts that came previously? They, like the rest of the puzzles, felt like they were there because the designers wanted to show off - "Look, we can do this too!"
This all goes back to something that Jonathan Blow has said, which is that when designing games we should respect our players and their time (no direct link on that one, sorry). Those arbitrary, constant deaths are disrespectful of my time - they require that I do the same thing repeatedly even though it provides no real benefit to me. This is a waste of my time. I don't buy games to see how great and amazing your ideas are, I buy them so that I can have an interesting experience.
It isn't difficult to respect the player without compromising a game's challenge. Braid and Professor Layton both accomplish this beautifully by rarely requiring the player to complete one specific objective in order to continue; the player must always be completing some objectives, but instead of banging their head against the wall trying to solve one puzzle they just can't get, both games allow the player to simply work on other puzzles until they're ready to give the old one another go.
While it may occasionally work to pit the player and the game in opposition to each other, as in the board game Pandemic, the odds should still generally be in the player's favour; the game, which is just a bunch of code and neither gains nor loses anything based on the result, should only have whatever advantages are necessary to make the experience more interesting for the player. If the game gets advantages just for the sake of making things difficult, something has gone wrong.
Lesson 4 - Context Matters
Limbo never gives the player any indication as to what they are doing or why they are doing it (the tiny throwaway blurb in the game's description notwithstanding). Throughout the experience I had absolute no idea where I was or what I was there for. This is one of the reasons that the puzzles seemed so haphazard. If the game took place in a consistent universe it would likely have to operate under a consistent set of rules, and the existence of all of the challenges would have to have at least some kind of internal consistency to them.
I know that a lot of people are interested in the idea of HUD-less game design, of not having tutorials, and of not putting story in games. To me, Limbo is a perfect example of why these ideas may sound good in theory, but just don't work in execution. I did not even remotely care what happenned at any point in the game, because, by providing the player with literally no context, nothing really happenned. The entire experience was just a set of disjointed ideas layered beside each other.
It started at some point, it ended at some point, but it didn't seem to matter where. The game could have started five chapters in and it could have ended five chapters sooner. Or any other random number. It just doesn't matter.
Context provides for coherent narrative, clearly, but it also provides for clearer gameplay. If the player knew where they were, what they were doing, and had at least some idea why they were doing it, then the game would seem like a cohesive whole and not disjointed set of ideas stuck together. This context, in the form of narrative, helps players make sense not just of the game's story and character, but also of its rules and objectives. I strongly feel that if Limbo had provided the player with better (or any) context for what they were doing, it's far less likely that some of the other problems would have occurred.
Games don't need to have in-depth character motivations or lengthy cut-scenes, but they do at least need to set the stage. Shadow of the Colossus, for example, has very little actual narrative, but it does make all the key information clear - you're there to revive a girl, you must do so by slaying several large creatures, and these creatures exist in a land that was previously inhabited but has since been abandoned and locked away. This is great - I now know what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and where it's happenning. I not only become invested in the action because of that, but I'm better able to understand it as well, which means I'm able to make sense of what's going on throughout the game and apply that understanding to the way that I play it.
Conclusion
From these smaller lessons, I think there are two larger lessons that are worth noting. The first is that consistency provides a sense of cohesiveness that is necessary from both a gameplay and a narrative perspective. The second is that it is important to communicate effectively to the player. There are many possible ways to communicate, but not communicating at all is not ambiguity, it's laziness, and it's also poor design.
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Lesson 1: There are rules, your set of rules are simpley too specielized than the rules that are in the game.
Imagine a bridge. You are walking past the bridge and reach the other side. Then you see another bridge. The bridge look very similar so you assume it is safe to cross, not aware that one of the planks in the bridge is loose. You get the point, don't you?
Nobody said life is fair or predictable.
But regardless of that. There is no problem with the trial and error gameplay, there is no problem with dieing a lot of times. That is because in LIMBO there is a small penalty for dieing. If you die you restart very near to the last place you died due to the auto save.
By the way, in mario you could die because you meet a new monster for the first time, or meet a boss for the first time and didn't know the boss pattern and how to defeat him the first time. Only when you die in mario you might need to restart way back.
This is ok, this is how most games work. You die a lot, get better, learn how to get past the place you died and then you come back and pass it.
I guess you don't really like most of the games if you don't like to trial and error.
[Good] Puzzles Have Clues
What happens when you need to solve something and you don't have clues? Like, I don't know... real life?
There is no problem with the trial and error approach because death has no penalty. Also, sometimes it was obvious what is needed to be done to pass the puzzle without trial and error. Or in most cases you knew what needed to be done but you needed to trial and error to figure out how to do it.
There are also clues from the nature of the game. The mechanics and even visuals give you clues.
I had no problem solving all the puzzles, some of them were more difficult, but I always figured out what to do after a while.
This is also not the case of trying everything until it works, because that really wouldn't work in LIMBO.
I believe the puzzles in LIMBO are perfect, because you can't just try everything to solve it, yet they are not extremly tough or hard to understand without help.
Lesson 3 - Respect The Player
This is you being paranoid. "They are doing this on purpose!"
I really enjoyed every part of the game, I didn't feel like all the paranoid nonsense you have mentioned.
Why can't you understand that what you think and feel about a game, you experience about a game does not mean this experience is exactly the same for other people playing the game.
The gravity bit was tons of fun. It make sense because this is LIMBO, a place where you are netiher here and neither there. Also, it was plain cool.
Lesson 4 - Context Matters
I agree with you about this point. I was feeling the game was lacking in context. It was ok the whole game, but the ending was really dissappointing.
Bottom line, I think you should try enjoy playing games more. Maybe if you lay off your developer, designer analytic point of view of the game, you could enjoy the game more.
I enjoyed LIMBO a lot.
"You are walking past the bridge and reach the other side. Then you see another bridge. The bridge look very similar so you assume it is safe to cross, not aware that one of the planks in the bridge is loose. "
If they loose plank is -to some degree- obvious (even if it is so subtle that I only see at my second try) it is OK. If it is a trap out of nowhere (The plank was loose but you are not able to see it) it is an immediate uninstall of the demo for me (if there is any).
Purely my opinion. And since I haven't seen a demo of Limbo (I didn't look) I read the reviews and decided that this is not my game, due to those kind of puzzles.
I understand that some people like that kind of gameplay though.
Obviously this is not your kind of game, if you are not even willing to try the demo. Part of the game is about trying stuff.
It's a good game, no matter how you look at it. I would think most people enjoy it, and people who are not even willing to try the demo are doing so from irrational reasons, even though they rationalized it.
I am not trying to mock, I am just saying lighten up, give it a try. I wouldn't say it to you if I thought it was just an above average game, I say this because I think it's a really good game.
I think I am done here, though.
I wonder when game design turned the corner and started assuming that you needed to cater to every type of game player and every game player likes to be spoon fed the experience.
Limbo is an extremely easy game to play, it's penalties are very forgiving. It feels as if you had a checklist that you failed to pencil in a few boxes when it came to Limbo. I think Limbo's real strength is its ability to allow the player to figure things out for themselves, you learn you can jump either when you press every button on the controller or when you encounter an obstacle that kills you setting you back a second of playtime. More games should assume that their players have some sort of prior knowledge of how games work.
When it comes to the 'context', how necessary is it? You are a little boy in the world, who goes right, do you really need more then that to enjoy the game? Videogames are obsessed with telling, when the players are more then capable to infer from the settings and characters provided, it worked for Left 4 Dead.
This entire post comes off as "I didn't like it, they must be doing it wrong, I will teach them." When, when looked at objectively, what I would suppose their goals were, were successful.
@Eric: I don't think Adam was saying that the game needs to be designed to cater for all types of players, or that players should be spoon-fed the experience. It's simply that there are better ways of handling things than Limbo manages.
For me, the fact that there is virtually no penalty for failure (which in some ways can be viewed as the ultimate dumbing down!) weakens both the gameplay and the emotional impact of the setting. As Adam has said, there is an element of "lets force the player to watch the boy die before allowing them to proceed" - the mantrap attached to a rope being a prime example. As a result, the emotional impact of the game is greatly weakened - his death has no meaning or consequence, but is instead an infinitely-reusable tool to be used to solve the puzzles.
Equally, when it comes to context: a single-player "anthromorphic" game (i.e. where the player controls a character, rather than an object such as a spaceship or coloured block) needs meaning and consequence to justify playing - unlike multiplayer games such as L4D, where human interaction can act as an alternative/substitute. With Limbo though, you have the mechanical journey from left to right, but there's isn't an emotional journey sitting next to it: the boy is just a rag-doll which you feed into the traps into order to proceed.
If the setting of the game wasn't so intense, then maybe this wouldn't matter so much - I love The Impossible Game (XBLIG), and that just involves a square jumping over other squares. However, the boy in Limbo is forced to both see and perform some truly horrible acts, which in turn sets up a very strong question: why is getting back so important?
Sadly, by failing to provide any personality for the boy or any background story, Limbo ends up being pretty much what it says on the tin...
In any case, each to their own: it's good that people have enjoyed Limbo, and hopefully it'll pave the way for more games which can provide a mature gaming experience!
"guess you don't really like most of the games if you don't like to trial and error."
The article never says or implies that trial and error to learn rules is a bad thing. The complaint in the article (which I fully agree with) is arbitrarily breaking or changing the rules. Once you fight a couple turtles in Mario, you understand the rules by which they operate. Brief trial and error reveals the rule and once it's revealed, it's consistent. If Mario made it so some goombas (which look and act identical to the rest) would kill you when you stomped on them, that would be the kind of bad game design that the article is talking about.
"Nobody said life is fair or predictable."
"What happens when you need to solve something and you don't have clues? Like, I don't know... real life?"
Saying that something is true in real life does not justify making that part of a game. Most developers have figured out a long time ago that realism for the sake of realism does not appeal to most gamers. If you're the exception, you might like this game: http://www.theonion.com/video/ultrarealistic-modern-warfare-game-features-awaiti
,14382/
Sure, there have been fun and successful games that don't follow these lessons, but as far as quality of puzzles, games that do, such as Braid and Portal, tend to be vastly more satisfying for the majority of gamers.
Thanks for the response!
While I agree that the emotional impact is lessoned by repeated deaths, I think as soon as you learn that you can die and come back, you lose most of that impact. Why is it necessary to punish the player for failing, particularly when the structure of your puzzles are more subtle? It isn't the eighties anymore, we've moved beyond trying to get kids to feed the machine more quarters, let them stay at the at the real challenge of the game, the puzzles.
For me, I interpreted the story by what was given, I thought it was a little boys journey through his suburban neighbourhood, imagining things taken to a more sinister extreme. I didn't need a cut scene about the boy at the beginning and if there was, I probably would've abandoned my own ability to craft a story that was interesting.
The fact that you can die and comeback isn't a huge problem - after all, it's what virtually every single platformer does. It's more to do with the fact that you *have* to die to progress: the traps in the game are designed so that on a first run, the boy will die several times - the two beartrap setpieces at the start of the game are a prime example.
It's this which trivialises the death of the boy: the developers have made his death part of the solution and have thereby removed any emotional meaning it may have. If there were more visual clues, if the player had a chance to study the set-pieces and avoid death on the first playthrough, then his death would have more meaning.
For instance:
Platformance: Castle Pain on Xbox Live Indie Games. This has a similar structure: anonymous knight trying to save the princess, lots of deadly set-pieces, frequent checkpoints - but the traps are visible - and the game even offers some clues scribbled in the margins of the painting! So yes: you'll die quite a few times figuring it out, but the deaths have a bit more meaning: they're part of the player's learning experience, not an unavoidable consequence of moving forward.
Star Guard (PC indie title). This is a game with minimalist pixel "stickman" graphics, and another one where death is effectively meaningless: you respawn where you died - but by providing a backstory scribbled on the walls, and by having you come across other soldiers fighting to progress, it gives your actions far greater meaning.
Regarding the story: I wasn't looking for cut-scenes or a 200-page essay, but *something* would have been nice. The only clue as to his motivation is the text on the Xbox Marketplace - within the game itself, the only hint as to the boy's purpose is when you reach the end and watch the little cut-scene. I'd have liked to see something more within the game - for example, he could have collected flowers along the way and this would have still left room for interpretation: are they a present, or is he trying to apologise? Is the girl dead and is he taking flowers for her grave? Etc.
It doesn't take much to provide a structure for people to try and build a story around, but Limbo has virtually nothing to use as a starting point. As a result, the theories are wildly divergent, from your "travel through the neighborhood" idea to a test, to the boy being an undead monster to a dream to an attempt at redemption...
And in some ways, that's great - but to my mind, it just makes the game feel soulless: it's effectively a blank piece of paper and everything that comes out of it is entirely from the player's mind.
@ Ofer
"Imagine a bridge. You are walking past the bridge and reach the other side. Then you see another bridge. The bridge look very similar so you assume it is safe to cross, not aware that one of the planks in the bridge is loose. You get the point, don't you?"
There are all sorts of ways to make this situation fair. Is there a creaking sound as I step onto the bridge? Does the bridge shake in an unusual way as I make my way across it? Does the bridge itself just look decrepit? Those are all good ways to communicate to the player. They require that the player pay attention and be observant, which is exactly what I think we should be asking of players in a puzzle game. Killing the player with no warning means that the player has to pay *less* attention since they know that the game is arbitrary and they can't do anything about it.
"By the way, in mario you could die because you meet a new monster for the first time, or meet a boss for the first time and didn't know the boss pattern and how to defeat him the first time. "
I'm assuming you're talking about the original NES Mario? There were visual cues that alerted you to the kinds of behaviours you could expect from the enemies. Enemies that couldn't be jumped on had spikes, enemies that turned into projectiles had shells, etc. The game communicated its rules visually, which I think is a totally valid way of doing things. It's also worth noting that back in those days it was assumed that players had read the instruction manual prior to playing, so most of that information would have already been imparted prior to the player even turning on the console.
"What happens when you need to solve something and you don't have clues? Like, I don't know... real life?"
Unless you're doing really advanced theoretical physics or something like that it's pretty unlikely that there isn't a book or a friend or a coworker or something that could help you out. But even if that weren't true, I don't understand why we would want to deliberately recreate the annoying, frustrating aspects of real life as part of our leisure time. We deal with those things in real life because we have to, not because we think it's a good way to spend our time.
"Why can't you understand that what you think and feel about a game, you experience about a game does not mean this experience is exactly the same for other people playing the game."
I deliberately used phrases like "I think" and "I feel" pretty often throughout the piece, but if it wasn't clear, then allow me to clarify - I was describing my own personal reactions and ideas about game design, and I'm not in any way suggesting that other people shouldn't be free to have their own ideas.
@ Eric
"I wonder when game design turned the corner and started assuming that you needed to cater to every type of game player and every game player likes to be spoon fed the experience."
It's not about spoon-feeding or catering, it's about being fair and communicating effectively. Two of the games I mentioned as good examples of puzzle games are Braid and Myst. Both of these games are generally considered to be *hard* games. They were certainly both games that gave me much more trouble than Limbo did. But the point is that both of those games were fair (with the exception of one puzzle in Braid that I felt was rather poorly conceived for the same reasons I dislike Limbo). The problem isn't that Limbo is difficult, because it's not, the problem is that Limbo is arbitrary.
"When it comes to the 'context', how necessary is it? You are a little boy in the world, who goes right, do you really need more then that to enjoy the game? Videogames are obsessed with telling, when the players are more then capable to infer from the settings and characters provided, it worked for Left 4 Dead."
I would argue that Left 4 Dead provided considerable context, first by taking place in what is essentially the real world, and secondly by drawing on a popular and well known concept, which is the zombie apocalypse. If you listen to the developer commentary for Left 4 Dead, you'll also find that the game communicates a great deal of information to players through the way that it's structured. The way that lighting is used to keep players alert as to where they need to go, for example, is an excellent example of using the environment to communicate key details in a way that is easily understood.
"For me, I interpreted the story by what was given, I thought it was a little boys journey through his suburban neighbourhood, imagining things taken to a more sinister extreme. I didn't need a cut scene about the boy at the beginning and if there was, I probably would've abandoned my own ability to craft a story that was interesting."
This comes down to a difference between what I look for in art and what some other people look for, but to me that points to extreme laziness on the part of the creator. If I have to make up a story or an explanation then the creators haven't done a good job. I interact with art because I want to know about the creator's ideas, their viewpoints, their creativity, their imagination, their experiences; I already have all of my own, and I don't need someone else's work to experience them. If I want to make up a story then I'll just make up a story. I play games, read books, watch movies, etc. because I want to know someone else's story.
I do think the game communicates the dangers ahead of time, but it doesn't need to. Because there is very little penalty for death, you can focus on the puzzle and how to solve it.
I didn't find anything wrong with the puzzles or frustrating about the game.
The puzzles were solvable and not extremly difficult with no need for any outside help. The game was not frustrating and was not punishing and it worked perfectly because the challanges were difficult but not too difficult.
I just fail to understand how you see in such a good game, such a horrible game.
I think most of your points are irrelevant. You havn't convinced me why:
A) The game needs to communicate the dangers.
B) The game must provide an option for the player to pass the whole game without dieng, and dieing is such a terrible thing in games eventhough there is very little penalty for it.
Ofer.
@Ofer - 'I just fail to understand how you see in such a good game, such a horrible game.'
Yep, you really seem to fail to understand. Sorry!
In particular, it seems to me that Adam writes from a Rational/Explorer point of view, while Ofer does a great job of demonstrating the Guardian/Achiever perspective. In a nutshell, the Rational/Explorer wants to be rewarded for Perceptiveness, while the Guardian/Achiever thinks it's obvious that Persistence should be enough to win.
I yap more about this at http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2007/12/persistence-vs-perception.html. Here I'll just say that the playstyles meta-model I've been using holds that the Perception-oriented gamer (or designer) cares about things like internal consistency and logical fairness. Being good at perceiving things -- analyzing data, recognizing patterns, and realizing solutions -- usually means preferring games that reward that strength. (Being rewarded for successfully doing something you think you're good at feels like "fun.") So when a game doesn't have sensible patterns, when it doesn't provide logical clues that allow players to demonstrate good perception skills, that game feels like the designers didn't care, like they just threw a bunch of puzzles together with no effort made to insure that the puzzles, individually or as a whole game, make sense. To the Perceptive player, that's not a fun game because it gives you no chance to demonstrate Perceptiveness.
Similarly, the Persistence-oriented gamer (or designer) is equally convinced that what really matters is demonstating that you're good at following the rules of the game. Whether those rules make logical or emotional sense is completely irrelevant; what makes it a "game" is that there are rules that create a challenge that can be overcome by being good at following the rules. Everything else is just window-dressing. From this perspective, what games ought to reward is persistence -- a dogged unwillingness to lose. The Guardian/Achiever's gift for learning and applying rules means that they don't mind if they bump into obstacles the first time -- they'll learn that obstacle is there and what the rule is for avoiding it, and next time they'll do better. If it means banging into things repeatedly, or grinding the same quest fifty times (rather than perceiving clues that allow a more direct route to a solution), that's fine to the Persistence-oriented gamer/designer as that gameplay rewards what (to them) really matters: hard work, continuous effort, concrete challenges, staying within the rules, and an unyielding determination never to give up.
I can't help but hear those two natural styles of play when I read the competing critiques of Limbo from Adam and Ofer. To someone who prefers challenges to be solvable through perceptiveness, the lack of logical clues for each of the puzzles of Limbo makes that game terribly frustrating. OTOH, the challenges in Limbo clearly have rules -- all you need in order to win is a willingness to apply persistent effort in applying those rules. So it's easy for a Persistence-oriented gamer to conclude that someone who doesn't enjoy playing Limbo must just be bad at games.
It's completely natural to judge the work of others by our personal standards. And it just has to be accepted that most gamers will always see games through the lens of their own playstyle preference. I certainly do judge the games I play according to whether they reward what I think I'm good at!
But I think it's reasonable to expect a higher standard from game *designers*. It's not always necessary to design every game so that every one of the major playstyles can enjoy it equally, but it can't hurt to be aware of other playstyles besides our own, to understand those other playstyles and what the gamers with those playstyles want from the games they play, and to look for aspects in the game being designed that can be fun for people with those other playstyles.
If a little extra playstyle-directed design effort can make a game more fun for more people, isn't that an investment worth making?
That is very interesting.
If I understand you, an extreme example of the Rational/Explorer would be that the player observe all the clues, the player gather all the puzzle related data. Then the player only need to think without pressing any button to figure out the puzzle. After figuring out the puzzle, all is left is to implement the solution.
The extreme example of Guardian/Achiever is simpley playing with the process of elimination. Simpley trying all the possible solution until you reach the correct solution.
I think LIMBO is neither of those. You do need to try out things in order to discover what are the rules. But after you discover the rules, it won't help you trying things randomly. You need to think how to solve it, since there are too many options to be able to use the process of elimination.
Some puzzles had only the first part, of discovering the rules. That is true, but the more advanced puzzles also had thinking to do.
The puzzle with the magnetism where you need to bring one metal crate to a higher platform so you can clibm of it is a good example. In this puzzle you have a button that activates the magnetism for a limited time.
You have two crates. You need one to jump over the first ledge, and you need the other to jump on the higher platform.
The problem is that due to the steep ledge and ceiling, those crates fall back down before you are able to catch one on the upper ledge.
This problem can't be solved by just trying random things, you need to figure out exactly what to do.
That's another good thing about LIMBO, there is only one solution for each puzzle. I don't understand why this bothers Adam, because it makes the puzzles a lot more "analytic" and more coherent.
I accepted early on that it's a you vs. the designer type game and I would come a cropper. I understood that and enjoyed cringing and cursing at the almost unavoidable; laughing and smiling, uttering "you evil b*stard" at the ones I foresaw. The pressure plate scenario you mentioned (where they are opposite triggers) actually had me smiling quite a bit at it's deviousness, especially as once you think you are past it you are forced to navigate it in the opposite direction. Evil genius right there.
It seems to me the game is a reaction to the more modern design theories you've detailed in this post. It's not holding your hand in any way, no matter how subtle. Thinking back, I actually can't remember that many times where death was unavoidable, although there were certainly a few situations. Often I felt they were there to take the seasoned gamers down a peg (which I thought was amusing). An example is the first time you see the spider. After collecting the bear trap and catching his leg a couple of times he lashes out, out of pattern. I came a cropper the first time because I was already pushing the trap in for the 3rd and final time as the designers had predicted (it has to be three times for a boss right?). I watched my girlfriend play the same section (having not seen me play it and not being as well versed in platformers) and she was nowhere near enough to be caught. She'd run away each time and take it far more cautiously.
Having said that there was one part of the game I got frustrated at and felt let it down a bit. The gravity switch you have to hit on the large drop at the start of the gravity section near the end just didn't read for me at all. I only hit it by accident because I was mashing buttons in frustration. There were 2 things I think let that one down: firstly you are under a time pressure (you have to scan the environment as you hurtle to your death) and secondly there was what looked like a rope underneath the buzz saw which looked like I might be able to grab and completely diverted my attention away from anything else. I think that switch/area could have been more clearly designed and still be tricky if the switch was better placed.
On the whole though LIMBO being a poor, lazy design just doesn't fit in my mind. I can certainly see that not everyone will enjoy or "get it" though and feel that Bart above is getting at what is the core problem here when he says it's about play styles. If there had been any more of that last example I gave, I wouldn't think as highly of it.
I think unfair design is fine when it's designed well, and I feel that LIMBO fits that bill. :)
Thanks for the post Adam.
That said, if I can try to paraphrase Adam, his complaint is not that there weren't rules. It's that the rules changed with no warning. This makes gameplay feel incredibly frustrating to someone who enjoys being good at pattern-recognition. Just when you've had the "aha!" moment where you've perceived how one of the challenges works, that success is denied in the next moment when the rules are arbitrarily changed. Without any clue of what's coming, there's no way to beat challenges through perceptiveness... so why would a Perception-oriented gamer want to play such a game?
As Gareth points out, all you can know in a game like that is that the designers will hose you in various inventive ways. Some people don't mind that, or even find it entertaining, and that's not a bad thing at all. But for the gamer who expects to be given a chance to figure things out, it just feels like they're being slapped repeatedly: "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong again, dummy, ha ha ha!"
That's not fun... for that kind of gamer.
All I'm trying to suggest here (since this is Adam's thread, not mine) is the old observation that "one man's meat is another's poison." Different people like different things. It's OK for some games to focus on satisfying a particular playstyle. But then it shouldn't be surprising that those games are described as being not-fun by gamers whose preferred playstyles aren't rewarded -- those critiques can have value, too.
*Edit - sorry for the rant before. next time i'll organize before i post. no offense meant of course.
Before I respond, let me note that I think Limbo falls into the category of games like Ico rather than puzzle games like Braid. It's my sense that the goal of Limbo isn't puzzle solving, per se, but that they embody the arena of the game and provide a means for the communication within the game which (mainly) involves the pain of death and escape from horror.
"Lesson 1 - Rules Are Important: Communicating the structure and rules of a game is of vital importance."
I think it just depends on the game. Limbo isn't Risk. Board games in particular certainly do function through the clear delineation of rules set out at the beginning. But video games, unlike board games, have a context of the game itself which in the case of Limbo, teaches you how to play and proceed by death. Trial and error, therefore, is the game of Limbo, or in other words, is the central gameplay mechanic. It's especially effective because the deaths are so painful. While such a mechanic couldn't work in a board game, video games are uniquely suited to that. Like in Super Mario Bros, you learn each obstacle as you meet it whether its Bowser or the Bullets and Flying Ships or big chainsaws and Spiders.
"Lesson 2 - [Good] Puzzles Have Clues: A puzzle should be made up primarily of two things: a defined goal, and clues as to how that goal might be achieved."
While I think Lesson 2 is a piggybacking off of Lesson 1, and not categorically different, this lesson speaks directly to contextual in-game references. Good games don't need signs to tell you how to proceed, or even (as in the case of Braid) a tutorial level to teach you new mechanics. Part of what is special about Limbo is the "scene of the encounter" as it were where you discover the new, the surreal, and the frightening. Through death you figure out how to proceed: the classic case in Limbo being learning you can't swim. Narrowing down possibilities and then exploring and trying new things is, de facto, the game of Limbo. The experience of that practice, as atmospheric and painful, is what separates Limbo from games like Braid or Tetris.
"Lesson 3 - Lesson 3 - Respect The Player: Those arbitrary, constant deaths are disrespectful of my time - they require that I do the same thing repeatedly even though it provides no real benefit to me. "
As noted above, I heartily disagree with the premise that death and repetition in Limbo are of no benefit. First of all, death by trial and error is the central gameplay mechanic in Limbo, that which teaches you how to proceed. Anything which teaches you how to proceed is benefitial to the player. Secondly, the deaths in Limbo are not arbitrary. Death in Limbo is categorically different than death in Super Mario Bros, which is why the scene of death is displayed. It causes the player psychic pain to experience it. And with infinite life (or permanent death, as it were) there is no consequence other than pain for mistakes. But the experience of death in Limbo is very specific part of the game. It simultaneously drives the player towards the need for escape, and serves as the primary means for learning how to escape. Without death in Limbo, we would just have a long walk through an aesthetically pleasing wilderness. I have a hard time thinking of how the process of death is a waste of time. It is in Mario, sure, but Limbo is a different sort of game.
Sure, most games don't encourage death and explain the rules like in Monopoly. But the reason why Limbo is the great game it is is that it isn't Monopoly or any of those other games. It breaks with the norm. Limbo respects the player by 1. actually giving him content that is equal to him as a thinking person rather than a computer AI 2. by allowing him a game that is as much about the scene of horror as it is about winning (in fact, in my opinion, Limbo explicitly isn't about winning) 3. by not giving us the same old thing. By presenting a different type of game, something out of the box, Limbo is respecting the adult player who is interested in new forms. The benefits seem clear to me.
"Lesson 4 - Context Matters: Throughout the experience I had absolute no idea where I was or what I was there for. "
While it's funny to think of this as a critique of (purported) puzzle games (I don't think Tetris needs context for instance), much less a game called Limbo where you wander around in the dark in search of an escape. Again, I think we're missing the in-game context here. Every single scene and movement in this world is communicating what we're "there for", though this wording makes me nervous. The magic of cinematic genres like Noir and Mystery/suspense is the unknown of the location, or the what "there for". Great cinema like Double Indemnity is all about this unknown which arises. Limbo, similarly, concerns the mystery of place. Does the player need to know an "inner determination" to proceed? In Limbo, the "there for" is simply to confront the present horror and to escape. Do we really need more than that? For my money, taking SMB again as example, the continual lack of the princess' arrival reveals the vacuousness of the "there for". When your goal keep slipping through your fingers yet you continue to play, at some point you play to play. Play to experience and play to encounter. And in the case of Limbo, play to escape from the pain into the hope of something different.
I think you've provided some really interesting view points, and explained things in a way that I hadn't considered. Really good stuff.
@ Gareth
Thanks for sharing your experiences, I think I've got a bit of a better idea about why perhaps some other people didn't find fault where I did. Oddly enough, the one puzzle you mention as feeling a bit unfair, which I've seen mentioned elsewhere, is one that I solved pretty quickly. I saw the gravity switch button right away so I seem to have spared myself some of the trouble that others ran into.
@ Chris
If you're just looking to vent then congratulations, I guess, but if you'd like to genuinely engage in dialogue I think it's reasonable to ask that you not engage in ad hominem attacks and unfounded guesses as to what kind of person I am. I'm open to and welcome disagreement, but there's no reason to make it personal.
And to a certain way of looking, dying and trying a different tactic to a challenge is akin to an exploration gameplay -- in the 4th dimension!
Though technically, as Chad Wagner puts it, clues are provided; they just cost a life. Granted, this essentially cheapens the value of "life" in the game, since it has to be mane an expendable resource. The question then is whether life is meant to be cheap or valuable, and it appears that in this game, life is intentionally made cheap.
Then again I also laughed in Demon's Souls when I ran out on a bridge and a dragon dropped out of the sky and crisped me without warning. Maybe it's just me. (^-^)
You get hit by new rules, but they don't change once you realize what rule governs a particular item. The final section where the whole world- even gravity itself- was conspiring against your character, was the most platforming fun I've had in years. Limbo stomped all over your little rules and delivered vast fun in the process. More power to it, I say! Got any more rules a clever indie developer can chew up and spit out in new and innovative ways?
As for emotional meaning from the death of a little silhouette, or the concept that fake pixel death cheapens fake pixel life... well, OK, I guess. Have fun with that.
As Chan Chun Phang said; life is intentionally made cheap, but is the little guy even alive?
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In the article, they talk to the team behind Limbo and there design philosophies. Also, it has sold 300,000 copies, so it looks like most of the people don't mind "puzzle game not having rules" (although I think it's more of a platform/adventure games).
What did you find new and innovative about Limbo's gameplay? The gravity switching that VVVVVV was based around? The control scheme that was virtually identical to Little Big Planet? The box pushing and rope swinging from every platform game of the past 10 years? The art style was interesting, for sure, but the actual gameplay had very little that I haven't already seen done better in other games.
@ Rick
I'm one of those 300 000, and I clearly didn't enjoy it. I don't know what the breakdown is between people who bought it and liked/disliked it, but I'd hesitate to say that short-term sales figures are a good indication as to how well liked a game is.
Also, while 300 000 copies is very good for a lot of indie games, it's still an extremely tiny portion of the entire game purchasing public, so even if most of the people who bought it liked it, that would still only account for the tiniest fraction of gamers. Maybe it would have sold more (or less) copies if it had been designed in a way I would have considered fair and honest.
Upon reading Bart's comments on a second look at the article, I couldn't resist posting, as I think Bart's comments are some of the most level-headed and useful I've seen lately. I love the points that essentially there are different types of gamers out there, and as a result different responses to gameplay. I really appreciate Bart's appraisal that much of our experiences with games is subjective.
My personal take on the argument, from a general standpoint (again, having not actually played the game being discussed), is that I don't think I would find rule-changing annoying or frustrating, yet more of a challenge. It has been mentioned that the rules don't change for a given location, just for similar scenarios at new locations, which I would personally find acceptable and even interesting, in general. On the otherhand, if the solution to the same puzzle at the same exact location changed arbitrarily, that would be quite frustrating.
To me, the little clues or hints that have been proposed are design polish that I think we would be wise to attempt to implement if our hope was to make the best game possible. Would the lack of these hints ruin the gameplay experience for me personally? No. But would adding the occasional little hint that I might figure out without having to die be a good thing? Yes. Regardless of how weak a "punishment" death is, I'd still feel better if I died less than if I died seven trillion times.
With or without the clues, I'd probably enjoy the game, as I love a challenge. But if I could also have the enjoyment of figuring out a few of the puzzles in advance, it could take a game with a 7 or 8 rating to a 9 or 10... for me personally :)
Considering that LIMBO was an entirely knew IP and sold only through XBOX Live, 300,000 is a very impressive sales total. And as far as seeing the response of the typical purchaser, doesn't XBOX Live allow players to rate games/downloads on a star system? Also, the fact that there is a demo suggests that many if not most purchasers had an opportunity to try the game to determine if it was something they like before joining the 300,000.
Anyhow, some very lucid and intelligent comments from Bart, Gareth and Chris in particular. I certainly experienced frustration while playing, but I remained engaged, and I think that desire to help the boy escape, and to avoid causing him unnecasary pain were part of that.
I'll admit to not having played Limbo yet. I feel as though I have a decent enough grasp of the issues from all that I've read to add my opinion, however.
I was initially nodding my head when reading the article. Coming from an adventure game background, most "puzzles" I've encountered required that you work through puzzles mentally while searching/exploring for subtle clues to help orient yourself towards Bart's "AHA!" moment that makes them worth solving in the first place. In the absence of clues, you're simply trying random actions until one of the actions causes the game to progress: "use pelican on cannon", "use pelican on sand", "use sand on cannon" etc. For more twitchy puzzle games (Portal, Braid, Limbo) the premise doesn't need to be so clear, but you still need SOME method to infer a solution: a mix of exploration and reasoning. The "rules" are discovered through exploration and then used to build up the reasoning through which to solve puzzles. Some games (myst for example) require a LOT of exploration for each puzzle, and the clues you discover don't typically transfer from puzzle to puzzle. Braid, on the other hand, has a very quick exploration but the discovered clues allow you to reason your way past many puzzles. Those who revel in the reasoning would enjoy a game that plays up that aspect (Braid). Those who enjoy exploration (or "perseverance" as Bart puts it) might enjoy a different kind of game (Limbo? I won't say Myst because reasoning is still a big deal in that game).
After reading responses, however, I realize that, perhaps, a big source of the devision over Limbo comes, not only from different play styles, but also from what constitutes "exploration".
Typically death in a game represents failure. Most games loom it over the player's head as an incentive to try really hard because otherwise you'll die! (ie. fail because you weren't good enough yet, keep practicing!) Along with this goes the idea that the less time you spend kicking the bucket, the more jolting it becomes when you do (think of how little you actually die in a good horror game).
From this perspective, Limbo sounds terrible: failing every few seconds through no fault of your own (other than that you can't see the future). How much fun is a game where it makes no difference how hard you try, you are bound to fail, because the game doesn't play fair? What's the point?
It seems, after some thought, that a key to Limbo is that dying and failing are two, entirely different things. Dying, here, really means nothing more than a chance to explore different options. It also seems apparant that this was a concious decision on the part of the developers. By playing up the death animations, they were either trying to illuminate or (more probably) obfuscate the meaninglesness of death in Limbo. It doesn't help that Limbo implies a strong backstory because "learning from death" has always been one of the most artificial, unstory-like aspects of video games. Many story-driven games eschew death altogether! This also explains why dying takes you no further than to the start of a puzzle. It's not designed to be punishment, but rather a snap back to square one so that you can explore another avenue.
So, if death is the primary exploratory tool than it makes sense that developer's would setup most of the "clues" in such a way that you only see them in dying. In addition, the exciting death scenes could be seen as an "incentive" to further test the puzzle-space.
As for the other two rules layed down by Adam:
1) Rules are important - I think that Limbo has rules: even if they're just the most basic sidescroller tropes. Braid emphasised a wonderfully complex system of rules and tweaked it at every stage. This is a cool design choice and a fundamental aspect of the game, but rule systems don't need to be this extensive. The only real rule in myst, for example, is that you walk around and click things. There were some puzzles that shared rules and that was neat, but it wasn't a central concept for the game. I will admit that games usually make the boundaries of the rules more obvious than Limbo does (from what people have said), though I can't say whether this is a really big deal.
2) Context Matters - Limbo obviously implies a context. Many games don't though and that's ok. Perhaps the issue is that it implies but never provides one. Recall Portal: It had barely any story to speak of but it is praised for it's story all the same. It did a heck of a lot of implying, and I think that people got a kick out of filling in the blanks. I guess I can't speak to Limbo directly on this... I'm inclined to believe that was another design choice in response to the "death doesn't matter" mechanic.
There is at least one thing about Limbo that I can appreciate even though I did not enjoy the gameplay. Its narrative and mechanics are tightly in sync. It looks, feels and plays like you're in some sort of purgatorial punishment land. I have to give it props for that.
In Limbo, the answer to a given puzzle is intrinsic to the puzzle. It's not extrinsic. By considering the tools you have at hand and the properties of the world, you can consider and experiment until you have your "A-ha!" moment.
What is consistent about te spaceship puzzle? You either use very laborious trial and error to arrive at a wholly arbitrary answer or you are fortunate enough to have the item that tells you the answer. There is no system there, no environmental ruleset.
I have some criticisms of Limbo but I very much enjoyed it. Each puzzle was an interesting challenge and they were satisfying to resolve. I'm sorry it wasn't your cup of tea but I don't believe your rules are actually rules; they are merely statements that describe games you like.
"The solution is to have noticed a number on some earlier inventory item? That doesn't reward anything other than obsessive thoroughness."
I can see how the brief description in this article might make you think that.
Firstly, there was no inventory. What you mainly gathered was isolated facts (e.g. the spaceship voltage,) understanding of the rules of each world, and fragments of the backstory. These overlapped of course.
Clues like the voltage were telegraphed by Myst in multiple ways. First, the clues were usually discovered as the payoff of playing with some machinery somewhere. (Of course, one of the points of Myst was to walk around and play with the strange machinery you found. So you would tend to run into clues.)
Secondly, once you found one or two of the clues and noticed how they corresponded to locations marked on a map, the map told you that there are more clues and approximate where to find them.
Thirdly, when you saw a clue, you knew it was something important even if you didn't what it was for yet. If you solve a puzzle, leading to a button that makes a huge tower rotate, just to reveal a number printed on the wall, you don't need to be told to write that number down. :-)
Motivating the player to both explore and solve were prominant yet inaccessible structures like the spaceship and the clock tower, acting both as visual landmarks and as teases. Not to mention the emerging storyline, which feels like backstory but culminates in a decision made by the player towards the end.
So Myst both rewarded exploration and encouraged it, but you didn't have to be obsessive to find what you needed. (And in a pinch you could use trial and error on some puzzles, as the article implied.)
"In Limbo, the answer to a given puzzle is intrinsic to the puzzle. It's not extrinsic."
To be fair, Myst was an adventure game, not a level-oriented puzzle game. The puzzles were not self-contained, but they obeyed the style and rules of each world that you travelled to.
From what I see Limbo is a sort of love/hate style game. I think the people who dislike it have a slight fear of failure. Like Bart said, if you feel like when you die your inner voice is saying "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong again, dummy, ha ha ha!" then of course that will be an unpleasant and frustrating experience.
The key point is that in Limbo death is used as a learning tool. Every puzzle game involves trial and error and figuring things out, but most don't kill you when you make a mistake. In Limbo you shouldn't feel bad or frustrated when you die, it is there to teach you something. Just the same as you don't feel bad when you turn a rubiks cube the wrong way, you learned something, try turning it the other way.
Adam, you mentioned that you liked braid, but I would argue that it is very similar to limbo. In braid you don't die, you simply rewind time. Limbo is almost the same, the only difference is you watch a cool death animation and then you respawn very close to where you were. The only reason I can see you getting frustrated with one of these games and not the other is again if you find dying frustrating and feel like you are wrong or a failure.
I enjoyed limbo a great deal and like some of the other posters I found myself laughing at the deviousness of many of the traps. I got the feeling that they playtested this game a great deal as every time you did the predictable thing something would be there to get you.
I think if the developers had made hints and kept the rules the same then the game wouldn't be half as good. Most of the enjoyment in limbo comes from figuring out the right solution - not from performing that solution. It never ever repeats the same mechanics. This is one of the reasons why I loved it so much. The devs understood that if they created another puzzle that had the same mechanic then it would be just repeating something the player had already solved and it would be boring.