Bottom Line Showdown: Unmechanical vs. LIMBO
Did I finish it: Yes, but I didnât bother with the secrets
Iâm playing with the format a bit this time because I want to compare and contrast these two. Kind of a Goofus and Gallant of physics-based puzzle games.
Unmechanical: An adorable robot helicopter that is shaped like an apple. It has many applecopter friends.
LIMBO: Some kid. Nobody likes him. Seriously.
Unmechanical: Youâre flying across a beautiful open plain with your fellow applecopters. Suddenly, you are snatched underground by a menacing robo-claw! Oh, no!
Also thereâs DLC where the intro is some dumb thing about a pink applecopter being kidnapped by the same automated facility and you going to help âher.â
LIMBO: You wake up. Where are you? What are you doing, other than going right? Â A cold open like this can work, but itâs got to be supported by well-paced revelations.
The Setting and Visual Style
Unmechanical: Everything is so pretty! Look at all these cool machines! Wow, that hole sure is dark, I donât wanna go in there! Whatâs in that other place, though? Let me get up there! I definitely feel invited to explore every room and play with the objects in them, even when Iâm not working on a puzzle.
LIMBO: Sure is greyscale in here. I get that this game was pretty early in the âsilhouette platformerâ fad, but that shit was garbage from day one, and almost always an indicator of pretension. The world is well-drawn, at least, but everything looks so awful. Itâs supposed to be depressing, but I think artists who do misery porn forget that boredom is a major part of depression. I donât want to be here, and I donât want to go there.
Unmechanical: While there are some set pieces that feel a little forced, like the Simon Says you run into early on, as the purpose and function of the facility gradually becomes clearer to you, the puzzles begin to seem like believable parts of it. Every so often, a new mechanic will be introduced to you, and the puzzles thereafter will tend to use all these tools together in some fashion.Â
Thereâs a few places where your path can branch, which further encourages exploration and isnât particularly common in 2D puzzlers. These branches are well-designed loops that send you back to the hub, so you wonât get lost trying to find the next puzzle.
You are never put in danger; the one time any actual harm is done to you is in the DLC, and itâs only to impose a limitation for the next set of puzzles. Youâre repaired shortly thereafter. This is important because a puzzle game, especially one based on object physics, should generally feel fairly relaxing. This encourages toying with things and abates frustration.
The difficulty curve is superb. Some of the early puzzles feel almost a little patronizing, but as you are shown the building blocks of the world youâre in, a comfortable ramp of challenge is built up. I only had to get help with one puzzle, and that was because I didnât realize I needed to reset something from a previous puzzle that was altering the conditions for the one I was on. The DLC is unfortunately different in this respect: I had to look up most of the puzzles, as puzzle elements were frequently visually hidden. I didnât care for this difference in approach at all.
LIMBO: This kid should seriously consider staying dead as a viable option. Why would you WANT to live in this place? Everything you have to deal with here serves as a reminder that the worst thing about brutal survival is that itâs tedious. The game is full of die-to-figure-it-out puzzles; if anyoneâs ever described it as âhard but fair,â they deserve to be punched square in the balls. An unwelcome degree of precision in platforming and timing is required for several of the puzzles; I can do this crap and harder, but Iâd prefer if it were kept to games that focus on it.
Stages are not strictly linear: this I assume because there are apparently some secret objects you can collect that I wasnât aware of until I had to look up a walkthrough to do one of the more obtuse puzzles, and accidentally got a text one instead of a video. The trouble is, since everything kills you, sometimes excruciatingly slowly, curiosity is heavily disincentivized. Iâm not going down that hole. Itâs obviously death.
Unmechanical: There is some. Itâs soothing and thematically appropriate.
LIMBO: There is none. (?!?!?) I mean... there might have been some. If there was, it was that sort of droning cave-noise junk that horror games always have somewhere in them, and so I never became aware of it. The soundscape is mostly (or entirely?) constrained to ambient noises, which are just as boring as everything looks. At one point a bunch of saw blades and other mechanical bullshit that was trying to kill me did synch up and sound like a Nine Inch Nails track. I guess that was kind of neat.
Unmechanical: Throughout the base game, youâll periodically encounter a larger copterbot with a wrench and flashlight taped to his head. At first youâre just curious about him, because he keeps hiding from you. Iâve seen him referred to as the janitor, as you see him sweeping at one point. In a few instances, he is directly (though rather trivially) obstructive to your progress.
Eventually, you find the machine that makes the strange floating balls of light that power the rest of the facility. It turns out that, until you were taken, thatâs where all the applecopters itâs sucking up go. This place is eating your friends. And the janitor is trying to prevent you from stopping it. These arenât broken units being recycled, either: their chassis are all untouched, and you can hear them squealing as they bump around inside the pneumatic tubes.Â
He saves you from a falling girder shortly after that, sacrificing his own life in the process. And I donât care. Heâs a Nazi collaborator. Giving himself what he deserved doesnât redeem him.
So, I told you all that so I could explain why the ending bugs me, as itâs the one place this game really screws up. You are given a âchoice.â That is in scare quotes because you arenât really aware of the ramifications of what youâre doing at the time. On the one hand, you can use the collaboratorâs blown-out chassis to fool the facilityâs sensors into letting you escape to freedom. Alternately, you can become the new janitor. Why? Why would you do that? If I could continue on to use my new powers to dismantle this horrible deathtrap, Iâd gladly do so, but it just fades to black, so I can only assume youâre going to be the same guy for the next poor bastard who doesnât get sucked straight to the processor.
The end of the DLC campaign suffers from a similar error. Although you know what youâre called upon to do this time, the âchoiceâ is still stupid. You can leave your crushed âgirlfriendâ on a switch to run away by yourself, or you can stuff yourself into a pair of exposed wires to power a machine that will bring her back to life, after which she carries your limp corpse out. The problem is, of course you do the latter, because itâs already been established that the kind of damage youâve taken is recoverable. Hell, itâs more surprising that she can be brought back; she looked as screwed up as the janitor was.
So, yes, the writing could be better. Overall, I feel like this is a risk any dev runs when they go for the âstorytelling without wordsâ bit, which is pretty popular in this genre.
LIMBO: Who the fuck cares? Nothing is ever revealed about this âsettingâ except that itâs a terrible place, where everyone and everything is trying to kill you, and usually succeeds. I never had any inkling of an objective other than âgo rightâ until about three-fourths of the way through the game, when I was pointlessly teased about some sad girl with a hime cut playing with rocks or some shit who I was apparently trying to reach. I had to find out from the store page that this is supposed to be your sister, and you did all this because you were âunsure of her fate.â Despite being given no reason in the game itself to have doubts about it, or indeed any hint that you had a sister to care about in the first place. Since the game is called LIMBO, is she supposed to be dead? Are you? I have no idea, and I have been given no reason to care.
Bottom Line: Unmechanical is worth $5, maybe $10 if you really love puzzles. LIMBO is only worth it at all if you really love them. Donât pay more than $1. I got it free and feel ripped off.
