Looking At Limbo, Facing Your Fears

A young boy wakes up in the middle of a dark forest. You only know it is a forest because you can make up the vague shapes of trees around you. The young boy is as vague as the forest that surrounds him. He is only, to you, a black shadow with blinking white eyes.

You heard that the boy is looking for his sister in this forest, but the game never really tells you that. It's just a throwaway statement from outside the game. You know this is some kind of platformer. Your physical memory takes over and you proceed to the left -- because salvation in video games is almost always to the left of the world.

You quickly realize that making your way through this forest won't be so easy. You come across some water and try to make your way to the other side. The young boy drowns before you. Damn, you died. This game will kill the young boy a lot too. Each death brings the player two things: information about the world and something new to fear. For now, you learn to fear water.

Not long after, you also learn to fear the giant spider that is stalking you and the "Others", young boys, just like your own avatar you guess, that are stuck in this world, this limbo. But the game makes you fear them, for they will try to kill you. Why do they want to kill you? Is it because you are different -- you have eyes, they don't -- or maybe because they went insane in this grey forest? It does not matter. Each time you will see their black silhouette, fear shall grip you.

Limbo does a great job installing those fears in your head, but it also goes beyond and asks you to face them. Slowly but surely, you will learn how to navigate your environment with your little avatar and how to use those traps you fear so much against your enemies. You will methodically take down all of the spider's legs and use her corpse as a platform (gross), you will kill those lost child with their own devious traps, and you will flood rooms in order to proceed in your journey.

It becomes less of a terrifying walk through a dark world and more of a rite of passage, an initiatory journey through the unknown. The young boy must face his fears and weaknesses to become a man. He must learn how to use what he fears to his own advantage. The boy becomes a man as he learns how to use and master his surrounding. The bear trap isn't a danger anymore; it's a spider-killing weapon.

It is no coincidence then that the young boy makes his way from a forest to a city, or some kind of giant factory. On a mechanical level, this new environment introduces new challenges: electricity, guns, saws and gravity switches for example. Like those in the forest, you will slowly learn how to manipulate them.

On a more abstract level, the passage from the forest to the factory makes a lot of sense if you look at this game as a story about the trials of growing up. The young boy goes from the forest -- playground for the children -- to the factory -- workplace for the adult. Both can be filled with adventures and dangers.

After making his way through the gauntlet, the young boy -- who is now a man -- finds himself back in the wood of his childhood. There, he sees his sister crying. The game then abruptly cuts to black. The young boy never gets to his sister, as if the game was telling us this old morale all over again; the journey is more important than the destination. This old saying is very true in the context of this game. We are never given a reason to care about that sister. The game in itself never even tells us that there is a sister to be found.

The young boy, and the player, is pushed forward to make it through the trials laid down by the game because he feels that the journey is going to be worth it, that there is something on the other side of this monochrome rainbow. Once you are there, you figure out that this sister could as well be an illusion, an oasis of hope for that young boy and for you.

Even if there is nothing on the other side of the rainbow, the boy became and man, and the player held his hand through the journey.