![]() ![]() One of the key ideas the game conveys is danger, specifically in its use of sharp objects like bear traps, spike pits, spider legs, and rotting pines that offer plentiful opportunities to impale, dismember, slice, and decapitate the protagonist. Lacking a tutorial, spoken dialogue, or any kind of straightforward set of instructions on how to play the game and the context for its story, Limbo instead relies on visuals and its spare gameplay to communicate ideas to players. Characters’ interior states of anxiety or distress are externalized onto a heavily stylized surrounding environment, and the effectiveness with which German Expressionist filmmakers were able to accomplish these ideas may explain its continuing influence on contemporary filmmakers like Tim Burton or Guillermo del Toro, and in Limbo here. Unable to produce costly realistic settings, filmmakers instead opted for more surrealistic environments and unnatural worlds that channel heightened, chaotic emotions. Caligari or in the monstrous shadows of Murnau’s Nosferatu, often deployed such bold artistic direction to compensate for limited budgets. The stylistic hallmarks of German Expressionism, perhaps best exemplified in the bizarre, angular set designs of The Cabinet of Dr. Limbo ’s aesthetic indebtedness to German Expressionism surfaces in its black-and-white presentation and even a faint flickering of light at the edges of the frame as though lit by candlelight or film projector. Devoid of any spoken dialogue with a soundtrack instead largely comprising low, humming ambient drones and diegetic sounds of wildlife or footsteps, the game recalls the experience of a silent film. ![]() ![]() Opening on the image of a silhouetted boy with glowing eyes rousing from slumber in a dark, foreboding forest ripped from Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Limbo instantly establishes its heavily stylized, expressionistic world cloaked in chiaroscuro shadows. These expressionist influences play a key role in Limbo, particularly in the stylized use of hostile environments and shadowy lighting that ground the psychological elements of the game, serving as a pretense for the physical manifestation of loss and trauma. Murnau, even suggesting that studio Playdead’s “expressionist inheritance” derives from his film The Last Laugh. Articles commonly position Limbo within the larger aesthetic framework of film noir and German Expressionism, as in Kris Lorischild’s likening of Limbo to the silent films of F. Such questions of Limbo and its meaning-its deeper themes and narrative goals-somewhat escapes much of the early conversations save for the few linked above. A deluge of exceptional articles from the now defunct Nightmare Mode -a bastion of independent games criticism from that era-stretch Limbo in different directions, such as Patricia Hernandez’s etymological breakdown of travel, Tom Auxier’s frustrations about the state of games writing in the wake of “games as art” discourse, and Eric Swain’s back-and-forth with other game essayists on the extent to which meaning can be parsed from a work that resists easy interpretation. Some addressed Limbo by subverting the expectations of the game review format itself, turning instead to short lyrical descriptions rather than talking about game mechanics altogether, such as Kirk Hamilton’s short review for Paste. Now over a decade since Limbo ’s initial debut, that period represents a time capsule of how we understood and wrote about games. Conversations around games as art found itself in full swing during the turn of the decade-catapulted especially by contemporaneous games released on Xbox Live Arcade like Braid and Super Meat Boy -and various reviews referenced such ideas floating in critical discourse. When Limbo first released in 2010, it did so during a formative period of critiquing games as art and thinking critically about the medium beyond simply product reviews that focused on performance and technical capability. Miguel Penabella treads through dangerous grounds.
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