This last weekend while hunkering down in anticipation of hurricane Irene I decided I’d kill the time between 60 mph wind surges and power outages by playing Limbo by Playdead.

(As an aside, this was after spending nearly 4 hour trying to get my Macbook Pro without an internal DVD drive to install Windows 7 in Bootcamp just so I could play Limbo… I’d replaced my DVD with the main platter drive and put in a SSD as the boot drive.  That turned out to be a major roadblock to getting Windows 7 installed through Bootcamp…  My experiences below may be colored by that frustration.)

First impressions about Limbo:  Beautiful design that conveys its mood wonderfully well.  A game that makes you think before you act.  Just the type of game I love.

However, regardless of all this beauty and the thoughtful puzzles I ultimately don’t think it’s a great game.

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s a good game.  It’s unique and interesting.  It’s certainly better than the majority of games you’ll play in its genre.  But it doesn’t always play fair.

To explain what I mean and why I think this is important, I’ll use Valve’s Portal (1 or 2) as an example of how game “fairness” is done right.

In both Portal and Limbo it is the player’s responsibility to carefully observe and understand the challenges presented and then figure out how the tools he or she has available can be used to overcome those obstacles.

The game designer’s responsibility is to provide the player a means to observe the challenge in such a way that the player can fully understand its implications and to give the player the tools to achieve success.

The above underlies the implicit promise made by the game designer to the player:  A sufficiently talented, observant, and careful player should be able to beat the game without failing.  The player always has a chance, even if it’s a very small one.

Portal is a great game because it always strives to fulfill its side of the bargain.  The game goes out of its way to provide the player with as much information about its traps, puzzles and the tools of the game as possible.  There is no cheating by the designers.  When I played Portal I felt like the designers were rooting for me to win.  When I couldn’t get past a particular puzzle quickly I didn’t get overly frustrated because I knew that there was a solution; I just didn’t see it yet.  Any failures were 100% my own fault and I only needed to step back and re-asses the information given to me.  Ultimately, it’s what puts me in complete control of my own experience in the game.

That was not the feeling I got from Limbo, though.  There were many times when playing through Limbo that I died from a trap that had absolutely no foreshadowing. In many instances I had no idea the trap even existed before getting killed by it.  Even if I suspected a trap existed there was no easy way to verify and see what it would do without actually wandering into it.

One example:  There are machine guns in Limbo that will kill you with extreme prejudice.  I have no idea how machine guns would come to be where they are (disconnect of level design and story) but whatever.  The visual indication of a machine gun is both a muzzle-looking image and what I assume is a targeting laser beam of some sort.

The muzzle didn’t look anything like a machine gun when I first saw it.  I thought it was some sort of a exhaust pipe or something.  Seeing that it didn’t do anything when I approached it, I figured it was inert till a later part of the level or even just a fancy part of the level background.

(The laser beam targeting looks almost exactly like the non-dangerous and inert water drains that are scattered throughout the game,  especially when it’s pointing down.  Which, if I remember correctly, is how the gun is placed when you first see it.  So I didn’t even consider that as something to specifically notice the first time I saw it.)

So I see a device that doesn’t make much sense.  I barely see a line that looks just like other inert elements of the level so I ignore it.  I walk into the gun’s line of fire not realizing that there is a line of fire to not walk into.  I die. Grrr.

This, and several other cases of similar deadly-mechanics-that-you-just-have-to-experience-to-know-exist (bear trap — how would you know what it is/does so you can trick an enemy into it without dying from it first?) ultimately made Limbo a very frustrating experience.  Playing it felt like the designer was cheating and not giving me a fair chance to win.  I suppose it’s possible that I could have figured out how to play through each trap without dying on the first go, but I find it highly unlikely.  Many traps required the player to get fairly close to a “death scenario” to trigger and they were almost impossible to trigger ahead of time via safer means.  This meant that the best way to get past a trap was to trigger it, learn from your death, then go again at it.  It’s a method that works, but it’s also not fair.

This is why Limbo, as good a game as it is, isn’t a great game.  Portal provides the player  challenges that are transparent; the player has the opportunity to see the complete puzzle before engaging with it.  In many cases, the player can even interact with the challenge in ways that let him better gauge how deadly or difficult the experience is without putting himself in any danger whatsoever.  If the player fails in Portal, it won’t be because the designers didn’t give the player enough information to succeed — the player succeeds or fails based purely on his own ability to use that information. It’s a very satisfying experience.

In Limbo, I felt like the designers were cheating; the game didn’t provide me the information I needed to be able to succeed on my own and forced me to learn by failure.  This made Limbo an unsatisfying experience and turned what could have been a great game into just a good game.

When you’re designing a game, give your players every opportunity to succeed.  It’ll provide a more enjoyable and satisfying experience for both designer and player.

-Corey Redlien

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