Limbo Fools Me Twice

So I played through Limbo this past weekend. Although the minimalistic style and abrupt, enigmatic ending are sure to get a lot of press, but it's a solid puzzle/platformer at its core. I'd highly recommend it to fans of Portal and Braid.

In this post I wanted to focus on the design choices made in one particular puzzle that struck me as noteworthy. As I'll be discussing my play experience there and how I got around it, I suppose this post contains mild spoilers. If you don't want to hear how to solve one of the many puzzles, be warned.

Relatively early in the game, I came across a huge press on the ceiling and an obvious button on the floor beneath it. I thought, "Okay, yeah, gotta jump over the button to avoid being smashed," and ran to do so. As soon as I got under the press, however, the floor before the button clicked and triggered the trap, smashing me into jelly. "Okay, that's weird." It was a subversion of common platformer gameplay, but I quickly surmised I'd have to jump onto the button and then hop over the rest of the floor.

It worked and I moved on until the same setup immediately followed. Without breaking stride, I leapt onto the button... which then triggered the trap and crushed me again. This one worked as initially expected.

I laughed out loud at how beautiful it was. My expectations had been dashed twice in quick succession. If the first trap had worked like it does 99.9% of the time in other platformers, I would have blown past it and been killed if the rules were inverted on the second. I probably would've been annoyed with the inexplicable change of rules too.

As it stood, however, I died twice. The first time I died because the trap was different from my prior gaming experiences. I died the second time because I had thrown out all of my previous experience due to a single anomaly. And I wasn't annoyed with either death. I was along for the ride. The game was carefully designed to take advantage of gamers' instincts and tweak them to keep things fresh and it did a great job of it in this case.

Games like Limbo (and Braid and Eversion) do a great job of taking the 2D platformers we grew up with and making them mature by manipulating the player's expectations of the gameplay. It doesn't take long for the player to be retrained, though. Eversion does a great job of turning a bright, cheerful 2D platformer into an absolutely terrifying "don't play this with the lights out" experience. However, once the player figures out the "scare" moments, they quickly become routine and (some) of the dread wears off. The double inversion of the trap's triggers in Limbo are a great example of keeping the player on their toes.