I had a tough time playing Limbo.

It wasn’t due to deficient game playing skills on my part or any bugs or faults with the game’s programming. No, I had a tough time playing through Limbo because I was genuinely unsettled by the hauntingly melancholy game atmosphere with its grainy black and white visuals and sparse, yet disturbing ambient sounds and audio cues.

You may think I’m talking about a new survival horror game, but I’m not. Limbo is a 2D platforming puzzle game.

“How is this possible?” you may ask. Just watch this short trailer:

I found it appropriate that the protagonist of the game is a young boy because a lot of what disturbed me in Limbo scared me as a child. I have a ghastly fear of spiders, insects, and man eating plants that crystallized in my youth somewhere between the piranha plants in Super Mario Bros. and the insects in Daikatana.

Death in Limbo is also an infinitely more powerful on screen event because it is happening to a little boy. My first death happened via running into a bear trap on the ground. The trap chomped my boy into an aerial concerto of bloody body parts which then collapsed limply to the ground. It quickly became obvious that I wasn’t going to be playing Rayman.

One particular scene early in the game has you walk by a white butterfly on the ground who flies off towards a tree that is clearly harboring a giant black spider lurking in the branches above. I must have spent a good five minutes sitting in my chair, paralyzed. I saw no obvious route around the tree, yet there was no fucking way I wanted to walk under three giant spider legs. Given that the game had established a precedent for grisly deaths by that point, I especially did not want to see what this spider was going to do to the little boy.

Eventually, I excruciatingly faced my fears and found a way past the spider situation. The game may “just” be in black and white, but the realistic animations of the boy and the world combine with the game’s desolate atmosphere to create a completely immersive experience.

Who are you? Why are you here? Where are you?

These are questions Danish developer Playdead want you to wonder about while playing through Limbo. And they did, in fact, linger in the back of my mind throughout the game’s first half, especially with the appearance of other humanoids (dead and alive). However, as the game progressed, I found myself caring less and less about these things and just focusing on what my next destination was and how to reach it. In other words, gameplay became the driving motivational force, not the search for greater meaning in the story.

A word about the gameplay: much of it is based on a “die first, figure out why after you respawn” paradigm. During your first playthrough you should expect to die often and die unexpectedly. This may sound like a frustrating nightmare, but for the most part isn’t, because there are bountiful checkpoints that place you close to your place of death. However, there are a couple of places in the game where I repeatedly yelled “Come on!” at my screen because I could not discern a certain goal and the death checkpoint forced me to play through a previous section before I could take a crack at it again.

Comparisons to Jonathan Blow’s breakthrough “indie” game, Braid, are bound to pop up due to both games belonging to a similar genre. I’ll take a shot at declaring a “winner” by saying that Limbo doesn’t quite reach Braid from both a gameplay and narrative standpoint. Overall, Limbo’s puzzles aren’t as elegantly designed as Braid’s. Many of the more difficult ones require precision timing and button pressing dexterity to solve problems, rather than imaginative and cereberal solutions. That’s not to say Limbo is poorly designed – there are some wonderfully devious puzzles that give a real sense of fulfillment once you figure them out. It just doesn’t feel as naturally rewarding as Braid did.

Braid’s narrative benefited from the use of prose in its introductory and ending sequences. These words really tugged at me emotionally and provided context for the story it was trying to get across. Limbo, on the other hand, does not have one word of text within the game. It relies solely on its greatest strength, its visual and audio atmosphere, to convey its message. Limbo starts off strong in this regard, but the sense of uneasy wonderment slowly peters out until the ending is reached. It’s an ending which I feel tries to capture the same level of existential meaningfulness as Braid, but ultimately falls short.

Having said all of this, Limbo still comes highly recommended if you enjoy playing puzzle platformers and/or delight in immersive and unique art styles. It’s unquestionably the best downloadable game I have played in 2010 thus far. Just be warned if you have qualms about viewing gruesome child deaths or have fear of giant insects.

One final tip: Don’t read the game’s description on Xbox Live Marketplace if you can avoid doing so. I think the game’s ultimate meaning is far more interesting and thought provoking were I not to have read the short premise on the description. For me, it was a throwaway fact that served to only narrow the possibilities of the game’s conclusion.

Limbo costs 1200 Microsoft Points ($15) as a downloadable title from the Xbox Live Marketplace. There is a trial version that encompasses the first two game chapters.

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You Don’t Know Jack is a trivia game from Chicago developer, Jellyvision. It was first introduced in 1995 as a PC CD-ROM title published by Berkeley Systems, whom you might remember as the people who made the “flying toasters” screensaver for your Windows 3.11 machine. Needless to say, YDKJ is the best thing that ever came out of that company. Billed with the tagline, “where high culture and pop culture collide”, YDKJ was (and is) the most well-written trivia game ever made. After spawning a few sequels and spinoffs (e.g. sports), the game disappeared in 2000 and was only recently brought back in a web format in winter of 2006-2007. YDKJ’s charm comes from it’s ability to seamlessly weave stuff like the movie Juno together with Roman mythology in creating trivia questions that will either make you feel smart, or borderline retarded. Either way, you’ll still be having fun.

The webgame consists of 7 questions, the bulk of which are your basic 4-choice trivia questions. Question 3 is always a “Dis or Dat”, where you’re told to categorize several items as they’re thrust in front of you. For example, in the game above, you’re asked whether certain symbols are personal ad abbreviations, element symbols, or both. The last question is always a “Jack Attack” where your goal is to match the right two items as they are presented to you. Taking the example from the game above again, you’re presented with a series of movie titles and you have to match which sport the movie depicts.

What differentiates YDKJ from other, more boring, trivia games is the polished presentation. Every question and choice is voiced by a snarky, yet not annoying announcer named Cookie. The narrative flows such that it feels like a game show written by Diablo Cody. The text and numbers on the screen spring to life like Pixar movie characters, which is an achievement in itself.

I have a fond place in my heart for YDKJ ever since I bought the first edition back in 1995. It was always great fun to have friends over, crammed next to each other at the computer keyboard matched in a battle of wits and lulz. Since then, I made it a point to buy every edition of the game until they stopped making them. I LOVED how creative Jellyvision was in creating the animation/sounds in introducing each question. The game made simple text seem like elaborate works of art. Ironically, this is pretty hard to describe in words, so I’ll link to a youtube video from the original game as a visual aid. If it’s one thing I wish was in the new online version of the game, it’s the fun question number intros. But that might just be for nostalgia’s sake more than anything.

Yahoo! just agreed to distribute You Don’t Know Jack under the Yahoo! casual games banner, so you could argue if this is a “true” indie game still, but fuck it, Jellyvision is still independent and more people need to play this game. The game’s a little over a year old, with 52 episodes + some Dis or Dat standalone games in the archives, so there’s a lot of content to go through.

The best part of it all? It’s free. You don’t even have to register. And it runs on anything. Mac, PC, IE, Firefox. As long as it supports Flash 8.0 it’s good. (here’s hoping for iphone compatibility when Apple gets their act together and patches in Flash support) Every episode of YDKJ is free and there are no annoying ads to go through at all. The experience of playing the game is sublime. Jellyvision has gone as far as allowing you to embed each episode of the game in places where html/flash are allowed. (see above) They even offer an RSS feed of new episodes! This is a developer who knows its shit!

Try out the game at the beginning of this post, I guarantee you’ll like it if you’re into trivia in the slightest.

Play more Jack [youdontknowjack.com]

Visit the developer’s site [jellyvision.com]

With the rise in popularity of games such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Singstar, the amalgamation of music and interactivity has reached the mainstream masses in recent years. As more and more people are exposed to music games, the complaint of “I don’t like the song list they have.” invariably surfaces sooner or later. Since it’s virtually impossible to cater to each and every person’s musical tastes, developers have done their best to have a little something for everyone. But what if you could use any song you have as the basis for such a game? Not just as a soundtrack, but as a crucial foundation to how the game is played. That’s exactly the basis for independent developer, Invisible Handlebar’s upcoming release, Audiosurf.

The essence of Audiosurf’s gameplay comes from piloting a futuristic craft along a racetrack, much like Wipeout or F-Zero if you’ve played those games before. However, unlike those games, the goal is not to achieve the fastest time or to eliminate the most opponents with weaponry. The goal in Audiosurf is to accumulate points by picking up colored blocks littered along the track and matching them in your grid. Once you get three or more blocks of the same color touching each other, they’ll disappear from your grid, putting points into your total. It’s kind of like Connect Four meets Puzzle Fighter. But that’s not even the most interesting part. Each time you play Audiosurf, you pick a music track from either the preloaded songs or any song from your own music library. The game supports many file formats, including WAV, MP3, AAC, OGG, and more. The racetrack and colored block placements are then generated based on the song you pick. So the valleys and twists and turns of the track coincide with the tempo and rhythm of the chosen song. As you pick up the colored blocks placed along the track you’ll notice that they also keep in time with the beat of the song.

Audiosurf also features online leaderboards for each song and different difficulty levels depending on how much you want to actively participate in playing the game. The controls are exceedingly simple. You’re either pressing left or right keys or moving your mouse to move your craft. The graphics are fully rendered in 3D and have some cool color effects. It’s not going to compare with something like Crysis, but it’s also not a shitty looking PopCap game either.

I had a blast trying out Massive Attack’s Teardrop and Justice’s Genesis with Audiosurf. The game suggests you try out songs with a strong beat at first, to get acclimated with the game controls. This makes sense as it also makes the experience a lot more salient. As the song builds in intensity you see your craft going up a hill. Then, as the song hits audio climaxes you feel a burst of speed as your craft glides down quickly and goes through twists and turns. It’s quite an experience and I think it’s one that will create a whole new way to listen to music. The game is active enough that you can’t be doing other stuff like working or browsing the web, but it’s also not so attention sucking as to push the music into the background. Audiosurf is also something that can appeal to any listener, whether or not they have experience playing video games. The controls basically amount to moving left or right so it’s very intuitive and easy to jump in with.

Invisible Handlebar has a very promising title on their hands here. As someone whose two biggest passions are music and games, Audiosurf is a game that successfully combines those activities into one cohesive audio-visual experience. The game has made as a finalist of the 2008 Independent Games Festival competition and rightly so. It feels so natural, you wonder why no one has done it before.

Audiosurf releases this month on PC (no word yet on other platforms), but you can download a beta now and try it out. I recommend you do so.

Download the beta from Fileshack [fileshack.com]

Audio-surf.com

Read the Development log

Welcome to the inaugural entry in a new ongoing feature series highlighting gaming’s best independent titles. If music and movies can have their “indie” titles be cutting edge and hip, why can’t games? The advent of digital distribution and micro transactions in the gaming industry has allowed more independent developers a shot at producing quality titles without a huge budget. While you may or may not have heard of the titles featured in these spotlights, rest assured that they come wholly recommended and are solid purchases for your gaming library.

Undertow is a new Xbox Live Arcade game from Chair Entertainment available for purchase today for 800 MS points ($10). The developer is best known for employing many of the driving forces behind the 2005 adventure game Advent Rising. They are also involved with Ender’s Game author, Orson Scott Card, in developing games based on the author’s Empire universe.

The game is essentially a 2d Battlefield 1942 that plays like Geometry Wars. Players use the left thumbstick to move their character and the right thumbstick to shoot in 8 directions. In addition, players can drop depth charges (read: grenades) with the left trigger and dash with the right trigger. Each team starts off with a certain amount of “tickets” with the goal being to deplete the other team’s ticket total. To accomplish this, teams vie for the control of several “bases” on the map. The more bases your team controls, the faster the opposing ticket count will decrease.

Undertow packs a surprising amount of depth into its 50mb body. There are 3 races with 4 character classes each to choose from. That’s right, character classes ala Team Fortress. You can choose from classes with different weapons ranging from a normal machine gun to a heavy weapons dude that shoots giant missiles. There are tradeoffs with manueverability with the different classes, though. On top of this, you are able to upgrade your character within a game in a sort of simplistic take on Call of Duty 4′s perk system. Killing enemies will net you more points and as you cross certain point thresholds, you are able to upgrade to a more powerful class. In the spirit keeping gameplay simple, you can only upgrade to a maximum of 3 levels.

In addition to 16-player (!) multiplayer matches, there’s also a robust single player/co-op campaign as well. That’s right, unlike Battlefield’s nonexistent single-player, Undertow comes with a fleshed out multi-act single player campaign replete with in game cutscenes and plot development! The gameplay is pretty much the same as in multiplayer, but the cohesive single player experience is certainly welcomed.

The game is built upon the ubiquitous Unreal 3 engine, which virtually guarantees that the game will be very pretty. I’m truly impressed by the engine’s ability to scale from a small 50mb arcade title to a giant production like Gears of War. The graphics are obviously not as detailed as a big budget production like Gears, but at the same time won’t be an eyesore.

For only 800 MS points, Undertow feels like a steal compared to many other arcade titles out there. There’s so much fun content packed within that you’re getting an incredible value for your money. If the game reaches a big enough userbase, I can see the multiplayer community having legs. The core gameplay is very addicting due to its deep, yet simple nature. At the very least, give the trial game a shot, you’ve got nothing to lose.

Read Shacknews’ interview with Chair’s creative director [Shacknews]