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Analysis: Limbo's Completion Time - What's in a Length?
by Kyle Orland [PC, Console/PC]
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July 27, 2010
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[Writer Kyle Orland discusses recent popular XBLA title Limbo -- specifically, the focus from the critical press and gaming audience on the game's length, examining the obsession with a game's length -- perhaps even over its content?]
Without a doubt, Xbox Live Arcade’s Limbo is an instant classic. The reviews are near-unanimous in their praise. Limbo is "bleak and beautiful." It’s "haunting." It’s "elegant and minimalistic." It’s "clever." It’s "gorgeously constructed." It "will stay with you for a very long time." Some are already calling it "a masterpiece." Others are breaking out the dreaded a-word: "Art."
But there’s one other thing Limbo reviewers are almost equally unanimous about. Some seem almost reluctant to bring it up. Others seem proud that they were able to find some flaw to balance out an otherwise glowing review.
Regardless, the critical consensus seems to be that Limbo is excellent but, well... it’s kind of short.
The Length Complaint
"The only real complaint I have of this game is that it is so short," writes Gaming Age. "Probably the only flaws that I can think of with Limbo are that the game is sadly shorter than it should be," writes Planet Xbox 360. "If you are concerned about the game’s length, you might want to see how low the price can go," writes Cheap Ass Gamer, living up to its name by complaining about the value of a high-quality $15 game.
Perhaps nothing speaks better of Limbo’s essential quality than the fact that the only negative most reviewers could come up with is that they want to play more of it. Still, it seems a bit gauche to bring up the game's length when everyone seems to agree the game is almost perfectly crafted in every other respect. It’s like whining that the Mona Lisa wasn’t painted on a bigger canvas, or that Casablanca wasn’t padded out with more fight scenes.
But many critics seem to agree that Limbo's length is lacking, even if they can’t agree what that length is exactly. "Four hours" seems to be the number most commonly cited in reviews, but plenty of critics claim it only took them three. Plenty more mention getting stuck in Limbo (HA!) for five or even six hours.
My personal favorite quote on Limbo’s length might come from The Review Crew, who say the game took them three to four hours, but "of course it will take you longer if you get stuck on the numerous puzzles." I mentally inserted the unwritten subtext: "Note: This game may take you a while if you are not as awesome at video games as we are."
A Matter Of Relatives
This brings us to one of the maddening facts that makes video game criticism different than criticism of most any other medium: length is not an absolute fact. Different players play at different paces -- a game that’s a two-hour breeze to some might be a ten-hour slog for others. The very idea of a set length doesn’t make sense for many games. How long does it take to complete The Sims? Tetris? The Multiplayer mode in Modern Warfare 2? These games are only as long as you are willing to keep playing them.
This should be the critical length benchmark for every game: not "How long until I reach the end?" (Are we theeeeere yet?) but "How long do I want to play?" Yet publishers constantly describe the "number of hours" for upcoming games as if that was a feature as concrete as "number of players." What usually goes unsaid in these inflated marketing claims of "hundreds of hours" of longevity is that 90% of those hours will be spent mindlessly grinding for experience points, or repeating endlessly similar escort missions, or chasing down hidden doodads that have long-since ceased being interesting to collect, all in pursuit of some quasi-mythical and utterly pointless "100%" on some statistics screen.
Perhaps this marketing push is why many critics seem fixated on length. Or perhaps they’re just used to judging games less as carefully constructed works of art (or even craft) and more as mere value propositions. "Give me X hours of gameplay for every Y dollars of my investment" is the unspoken context of this type of review.
The relative quality of those hours -- and whether all those hours eventually come together into some sort of satisfying whole -- don’t seem to matter much to these critics. As long as the game is suitably distracting from the essential emptiness of everyday living, then more quantity equals more quality, as far as they’re concerned. And hey, if that game only costs $20, that leaves $40 extra in the budget left over to take the family out to a thoroughly enjoyable two-hour movie. Er, wait...
The Value Of An Hour
This value-based approach to reviewing seems ill-suited for a game as carefully constructed and self-contained as Limbo. Heck, it seems inappropriate for any game, especially considering that reviewers often rush through their single, straightforward playthrough of a game as quickly as possible in order to meet some very tight deadlines. How are these reviewers supposed to judge replay value when they’re expected to move on to the next game on their review pile almost immediately? In fact, you’d think most reviewers would appreciate a shorter game, given the mountains of unplayed games sitting unloved on their shelves (poor babies).
Still, it seems wrong to totally ignore the issue of game length. Games are consumer products as well as works of art, and sometimes even a good game doesn’t provide sufficient value for the money. One of the most elegant solutions to this problem I’ve seen came from the sadly short-lived Game Buyer magazine, a Future publication which ran for four months in late 1998.
Each review in Game Buyer came with a horribly unscientific graph with time on the X axis and the game’s "tilt level" on the Y axis. So a game that started slow but had tons of replay value would have an upward curve, while a game that started with a bang but fizzled out would curve downwards. Bang! The value proposition in a handy visual format -- you don’t even have to waste any words in the review text!
To be fair, many reviewers seem to be handling the problem of Limbo’s length appropriately, even without the aid of graphs. The Telegraph review mentioned a "perfectly formed running time of around four hours," while 7outof10 pointed out that the game "packs more spine-tingling wonder and horror into its opening hour as those games manage in eight or more." Some reviews, most notably Paste’s and Eurogamer’s, even managed to capture the game elegantly without mentioning the running time at all (or, in the case of Eurogamer, downplaying it).
But perhaps the most elegant statement on the matter of Limbo’s length came, surprisingly (to me at least), from IGN’s review of the game: "While [five or six hours] may sound short, it's better for a game to leave us wanting more than to overstay its welcome."
Amen.
[Kyle Orland is a freelance video game journalist with over a decade of experience, if you count reviews for his college paper and fansite Super Mario Bros. HQ, and he’d appreciate it if you did. He’s written about issues surrounding the game press for a variety of outlets, most recently at his new blog, which is also called The Game Beat.]
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For most people it will take them longer and they may not do it in one sitting.
But in the end, it was a beautiful game.
I do think the reviewer has a responsibility to mention play time in any game. The reader can disregard the information or use it to further define their expected value.
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Rather than the subtext of this article which is "everyone else has said it's too short so I'll go ahead and say the opposite because I'm cool".
Whenever the issue of violent games gets raised, the industry bleats on about the average age of a gamer being in their mid-thirties. Well if that's the case, stop designing bloody games for those that finish school at 3pm, play video games for 12 hours then go onto online forums to complain about the length of video games!
What am I missing?
I prefer the experience of completing games to the (far more common) experience of realizing i've moved on to something else. (i'm 32, have day job and several hobbies. thus, spending more than a couple hours on video games each night often strikes me as a painful waste of precious time.)
When I complete a more polished and condensed game: I'm more likely go back and play again.
I've played through Portal at least 4 times. I completed Limbo last night, and am now urging my girlfriend to play through it for the mood (which I'll likely watch). Sooo. Feels much more valuable to me than ME2 or AlanWake (which I play by myself in small chunks).
* Seems like I end up just replaying multiplayer games these days, so I can get some satisfaction from a "couple hours." (mostly play left4dead2 mutations & alien swarm on pc, and gears2 Horde on xbox). Is it fair to think of these games as extremely short polished experiences? basically 2 hour long games that I'm just playing repeatedly?
maybe Limbo reviewers meant to complain about the lack of breadth. I don't see a lot of "other" ways to explore the environment.
As bizarre as that sounds, there was a nugget of truth in it. At the time TSR, makers of Dungeons & Dragons, were cutting costs by reducing wordcount in their standard-sized products. To stretch fewer words onto the same number of pages, they started increasing margins and adding graphic borders. For a brief period they were publishing books with margins & borders of two inches on all sides -- big enough that it actually looked ridiculous once you blinked a couple times and understood -- and the text itself was also of generous size and spacing. It was a transparent money-grab and it left a bad taste in a lot of gamers' mouths in those days.
However, that kind of cost-cutting is not at work here. Criticisms of game length are pretty ridiculous.
I'm not trying to troll or anything like that. I'm really just wondering where the perceived value of the product is.
So ends the '3 hour play time' as valid criticism. If the designers can cram as much enjoyment as they did with Portal and Limbo in a three hour serving, you can't call the game 'short' as you would 'efficient.'
My brother and I both played Dragon Age last winter. I worked full time over my school break. He decided not to work. I sunk about an hour or two every night into that game for almost a month and got through the origin, the first town and the mage tower. He finished the whole game in 6 14-hour game sessions. We both loved the game, but I couldn't help but feel that the game was meant to be played in larger chunks like he did. Some stories demand length and heavier commitment. It's hard to be epic in 3 hours. Still, I wish that Dragon Age had been shorter so that I could have finished it in a month. Sometimes things are too long, even when they're fun the whole time, because we eventually get bored of good things and bad things alike.
Many older, NES games are very short. Double Dragon 2 is a game I can play from start to finish in about 25 minutes and I still enjoy playing it after all this time. There aren't many games you can say that about.
How good or bad a game is should have nothing to do with its length.
Then again, $60 is a lot of money to spend on a game which is only going to keep the player occupied for 10hrs. With $60 I could buy a couple movies or a few books, a lot more than one game that I might not like.
Of course, movies, books and games have all different times of consumption; while a movie usually take two hour of your life, a game has a consumption time similar to a book, with relatively lenghty sessions (around one hour, at least for me -0 if the game or the book is good, of course) in certain times of the day.
Also, a game ideal lenght should not be determinated arbitrarily its publishers, but by the amount, variety and quality of new situations the designers can build around its central mechanics. At least in my little perfect world, anyway.
If anyone would like to gripe at game about it's play-through time, let that be God of War III ($60 game with a $43 Million budget and it only takes 6-7 hours to play through with virtually no replay incentives?). Limbo is fine the way it is. Sometimes less really is more.
Maybe made an online mode in game that lets you get online and talk about it at the same time you just have your little person stand there. Multiplayer! They could have someone from your friends list play the game with you where you both can stand there and talk to each other!
/sarcasm
The important thing is making the right game with the right features. Too many developers chase all the hyped features that just don't add to the game they are creating. I'm probably getting Limbo simply because it looks so well designed and very little criticism that matters. "It's too short!" says the full time game reviewer. Yeah, whatever it probably is a great entertainment value for me - just like Braid was.
Now, get this: Half-Minute Hero cost me ten pounds; and Vagrant Story, on the other hand, cost me four – about the price of a return bus ticket into town for me.
I'm not sure what value is, but I don't think it's about length – at least, not directly anyway. It's an experience that's really changed the way I think about games.
Portal was too short, but I think it is valuable to think of length not in terms of time, but in terms of how well developed the mechanic is. Portal, to me, felt like the first half of a really good game. The puzzles never got that hard and the first half of it was basically a tutorial.
I haven't played Limbo, but if it makes full use of its mechanics in the time that it lasts then it is good. A lot of short games with really deep mechanics are just selling themselves short (har har) by not developing enough level content to go with the mechanic. If the game is really simple, then I'm fine with it being short because I'd get bored of a 40-hour version of Tic-Tac-Toe with a story mode.
People seem to glaze over this. Obviously YMMV, but for me, the best 'scene' in the game came very early on (I'll just say 'mechanical spider leg'). That little set-piece was part of what appeared to be the core theme as I played the first section of the game. Namely, that of 'Others': ellusive, malevolent tormentors, chasing and disappearing in front of our lonely, scared protagonist as we guide him, stumbling, through a terrifying, foreign landscape. The rest of the game totally abandoned that theme in favour of dragging boxes around a factory, riding conveyor belts, flipping gravity, and other genre stalwarts. I found it rather jarring, as did everyone else I spoke to about it. It's as if someone zapped everyone's memory with one of those gadgets from Men In Black; I mean come on - does no-one remember the giant spider? Where did all that cool, creepy stuff go?
Too short at three hours? Two hours too long if you ask me. (Caveat: I still would have paid my £10 for the first hour alone).
And to dismiss any aspect of the game, including length, as a valid critical point, is absurd to me.