Gaming’s dark little arthouse darling.

The first hint Limbo is a different type of video game comes at the beginning, when it kicks off without even telling you how to play. You fumble around with your controller or keyboard until the little boy onscreen wakes up and starts to walk forward under your command. Before long, the game gives you another hint: When you accidentally steer the boy into a pit of spikes, the boy falls and the spikes stab through his body and kill him instantly. Blood spurts. The little lights of the boy’s eyes go out. Jesus.

Limbo is a platforming game from independent developer Playdead[1]. It’s a work of insanity, or genius, or maybe awful, profound loneliness. There’s never been a game like it, and that was the hope: Limbo was designed to be disorienting, confounding, disturbing, and strange for even the most seasoned gamers. Despite its lack of convention, the game was an unexpected commercial success, a critical darling, and the instigator of a wave of counter-cultural game design that would continue throughout the 2010s. Limbo couldn’t have cared less about the video game industry; it might have changed the industry forever.

Limbo is easy to summarize but near-impossible to explain. The game is a 2-D side-scrolling platformer like Super Mario or Sonic, in which the player traverses the environment by running and jumping past obstacles and solving puzzles, but instead of the player controlling an Italian plumber or a blue hedgehog, Limbo puts them in charge of a nameless little boy.

That’s about all that’s clear. Limbo only uses nine words to introduce its story: “Uncertain of his sister’s fate, a boy enters Limbo.” These lines appear onscreen before the game fades in and the boy wakes up, but that’s it by way of explanation or context for the entire game. The player is left to decipher the boy’s purpose for themselves. It’s up to you what the boy’s journey is “about.”

But based on the world of Limbo, the boy’s journey can’t be based in anything good—or at the least, cheerful. This is not a land of pipes and flags and golden rings. Instead, the boy wanders through a hazy, black-and-white underworld full of giant spiders, decaying factories, and lakes dotted with floating corpses[2]. Instead of mushrooms or stars as power-ups, the boy will sometimes encounter mind-controlling slugs that force him in one direction until the player can find a way to extract them from his brain. It’s grotesque. Limbo might be the first horror platformer.

There are hints as to what’s going on in the broader world of the game or inside the mind of the boy—some enemies and environments feel metaphorical—but Limbo only offers clues, never answers, and the game’s abrupt ending does little to provide resolution. To this day, no one can say for sure what Limbo means or is about. Not even the game’s developers have shared their interpretation of its unsettling imagery[3].

It was said before that Limbo is a singular work, and that’s almost literally true. The game was conceived in 2004 by Arnt Jensen, a Danish game designer working for developer IO Interactive[4]. IO is a generally well-regarded company, but like any AAA developer[5], they were quite corporate, and Jensen struggled with an environment that put so many barriers between his ideas and what actually appeared in the game. He had vision, and in his view, there wasn’t room for that vision within the AAA side of the industry. Jensen left IO in 2004 and began working on his passion project—Limbo—alone.

Though Jensen had Limbo all mapped out in his head, he learned fast developing the game was beyond his sole capabilities. After about two years of wrestling with the game on his own, he put together a concept trailer for Limbo, an advertisement for the game he could use to attract outside help.

Limbo’s trailer was a smash hit, with hundreds of thousands of influential eyeballs taking note of the game’s impressionistic art design, melancholy atmosphere, and fluid animation. The most important set of viewing eyeballs belonged to Dino Patti, another spurned industry rebel who had also left a corporate design job out of exasperation with red tape. Jensen and Patti were practical complements and philosophical equals. Together, they formed Playdead, an independent game studio that functioned solely—at the time—to bring Limbo to the world[6].

Jensen’s paranoia over creative meddling meant Limbo’s development took much longer than Jensen or Patti anticipated (the process involved many more people than expected, too—as many as 16 programmers at one point, with eight of them being full-time Playdead staff). For one, Jensen and Patti didn’t outsource any of the game’s technology to a third-party engine, meaning Limbo’s developers had to build the entire thing from the ground up. For another thing, investors—an easy way for independent companies to gather resources and speed up production—had a hard time coming aboard the Playdead ship. Jensen’s trailer had made Limbo one of the most anticipated and attractive independent titles in years, but so many investors attached stipulations to their involvement[7] that Jensen, with only a few exceptions, kept the door shut tight.

On one level, there’s a way to read Playdead’s insularity as creatively intrepid and artistic, but on another level, you can see Jensen as not just an industry skeptic, but an industry cynic, sometimes to the detriment of his company. In a 2012 interview with Edge, he said of Limbo’s buzz: “I got very scared by all these people contacting me. It was a one-man project [in 2006], and it felt like they wanted to control it and be a part of it. I was so scared that people would take it away from me and make it more commercialized.”

Jensen saw Limbo more like an art project than a game. The point wasn’t to sell anything[8], it was to express a perspective, outside opinion be damned. Jensen (and Patti, by extension) wanted to detach themselves completely from the industry that had once damped their creative passions, and they’d protect those passions by keeping their operation small, under their watch, and never delegating[9]. Another revealing Jensen quote: “I don’t want to care about what people think games should be like. Fuck it all. I just want them to feel it.”

And at the end of the day, you have to hand it to Jensen and Patti, because when Limbo was released after six long years in development, people did, indeed, feel it. Limbo is one of the most acclaimed (and purchased—thanks to its prominent promotion in Microsoft’s indie-centric “Summer of Arcade” web store[10]) indie titles ever. Its platforming core made its gameplay familiar to just about anyone who had picked up a controller before, but beyond that, no one had seen, heard, or felt anything like it.

Limbo is, above everything, an uncomfortable experience. The unease begins with the game’s main mechanic, darkly referred to as “trial and death.” Limbo presents environmental puzzles the player must solve to continue their journey. In many platformers, when a player solves a puzzle, the game delivers an obvious cue they’ve succeeded, like an unlocking door or an activated switch. These cues are meant to streamline the puzzle-solving process and keep the player from having to “test” solutions that won’t work. You can line everything up, be sure it’s correct, and keep going. Limbo doesn’t work like that.

When you need to solve a puzzle in Limbo—like, say, find a safe way past a giant spider—you can’t be sure you’ve found the answer until you try to, well, walk past the giant spider. So when the monster extends one of its legs and stabs the boy through the middle and flings him to the ground like a rag doll, you’ll know you failed. The game will reset just before you reach the spider, and you’ll try something else. It’s a sick bit of negative reinforcement. The deaths are so appalling—and the spider so terrifying—you’ll want to reach the same certainty you would in a less twisted (but perhaps less intelligent) game.

The artistic elements of Limbo are subversive, too. Recalling Jensen’s quote in which he says, “I just want [players] to feel it,” it’s clear how Limbo was built toward a mood or idea rather than a gameplay experience. The game’s sound and visuals are abstract. Instead of a traditional score, there’s an arrangement of ambient sounds made to establish mood. Instead of great depth of field, the background is blurred. The player can see things dart through the space just beyond the boy, and they can make out rustles, buzzes, whispers, and hums in the score, but it’s impossible to tell exactly what anything is. That’s on purpose. Jensen and Patti wanted players to project their own ideas into the game, literally see and hear things that weren’t there.

In an industry that was trending toward realism at the turn of the decade, Limbo’s design is a huge contrast. Ten years ago, video games were stuck in a tired mode of evaluation that said the more lifelike something looked or sounded or played, the better it was. The realism trend created fissures in every genre, from adventure games[11] to sports[12] to first-person shooters[13]. Graphics, of course, were at the center of this debate, and while video game critics learned to appreciate alternative visual approaches early in their emergence, it took a while for players to catch up. Today, the independent game scene is loaded with untraditionally beautiful titles[14], but back when Limbo was coming out, a lack of realism was seen more as a sign of a low budget than a sign of creativity or artistry.

In Limbo, however, the visual style and sound design forced the player into the experience, and in a game as disturbing, unexpected and unpredictable as this, that’s an uncomfortable dynamic. Limbo is a game you don’t want to think about too much, and yet, due to its precision-based gameplay and visual, aural abstraction, you can’t play it in a detached way. That means five to six hours of sitting there with the controller in your hand, forcing the boy onward, watching him die, grappling with the game’s musings on death, loss, and loneliness. It’s a profound experience. It sucks.

And then the ending, as confounding and open to interpretation as a video game ending can be. It has enough clues for you to draw a conclusion, but not enough to make you confident in the conclusion you draw. It’s memorable, sudden, specific, possibly awe-inspiring and just as possibly frustrating. In the context of a game like Limbo, which becomes more and more affected by your impressions the longer you sit with it, it’s perfect. Within the demanding, entitled fan culture of the 2010s, it’s so bold it threatens to tarnish the game’s legacy at every turn (somehow, it hasn’t).

Jensen and Patti have preserved the open ending, too. Jensen had a specific interpretation in mind when he wrote the game, but he hasn’t shared it, saying instead that when anyone comes close to guessing what Limbo means, it terrifies him. So the uncompromising artist who makes games as a mode of expression is scared of people deciphering that expression. Go figure.

Playdead’s narrow approach to game design might feel pretentious to some gamers, but inside the industry, the success of Limbo emboldened developers to make the games they wanted to make even if no one wanted to play them. If Braid established the indie market in 2008 and Limbo legitimized it in 2010, the market is now almost overpopulated with creators’ specific takes on what games can be. This means there’s plenty of garbage out there, but Limbo’s subversion also paved the way for all kinds of exciting remixes and riffs, from throwback homages like Super Meat Boy[15] to mechanical gimmicks like Superhot[16] to what some even call anti-game experiences like Gone Home[17].

The indie scene is so robust now it almost serves as a mirror to the AAA scene. Indie games respond to, critique, and perfect gaming trends in a way that pushes all video games forward in story, gameplay, and presentation. Limbo and its creators rebelled against the industry’s corporate structure to create an environment where artistic vision couldn’t be threatened by demanding hierarchal superiors. What’s more, the resultant project was such a hit that it transformed Playdead from a front for making one game to a respected gaming boutique. Tons of mid-level game developers left AAA companies and followed in Jensen and Patti’s footsteps, and now, revered companies like Irrational Games, Valve, and Bethesda have “family trees” extending through the gaming industry made up of professionals who left corporate systems and went off to make well-regarded indie projects.

As we enter the 2020s, indie developers are at a crossroads. Their corner of the industry is strong enough for the more successful companies to assume something adjacent to AAA status[18], and it’s diverse enough for single operators to turn out acclaimed games at their own pace without sacrificing exposure or marketability. Indie companies can be as big or as small as they want, and thanks to a combination of the industry’s lingering meritocracy-ish structure and the internet’s possibility, there’s no right or wrong way to operate as an indie studio now.

But as for Playdead, they didn’t capitalize much on Limbo’s success. In fact, for Jensen and Patti, the success of Limbo was only a means by which they could achieve greater artistic ends. Although their game had positioned them to grow Playdead into something greater than either had envisioned in 2006, they took their Limbo profits and bought out every investor who had backed them, resuming sole ownership over Playdead again. They downsized, but they had everything they wanted and nothing they didn’t. That was real independence.

[1] Video game developers have a knack for coming up with catchy, gamey-sounding names: Playdead, Valve, Rockstar, Capcom, Rocksteady, Naughty Dog, and Double Fine are all terrific, punchy company monikers. On the other hand, sometimes when you round up a bunch of nerds and ask them to name their company, they land on something lame like Electronic Arts. Y’all really strained for that one, huh?

[2] At one point, the player uses the dead bodies as lily pads to hop across a dangerous body of water. It’s hard to say for sure if Limbo nails the physics of how bloated corpses float and bob in water when you step on them, but it certainly feels accurate.

[3] This essay won’t dive too much into interpretation of Limbo’s story or ending. In general terms, it’s enough context to say the game presents ideas about loss, death, and loneliness. How those things balance out or order themselves in the mind of the player is going to be different for everyone, but as we will discuss, that’s part of what makes the game so great. Limbo doesn’t have a “correct” meaning, so part of the experience is deciding where you draw definitive conclusions and where you let things remain a mystery.

[4] IO Interactive is best known for the Hitman franchise.

[5] This definition appears in other chapters, but just in case, a AAA video game is like a blockbuster movie: major development support, huge budget.

[6] Playdead would only release two games in the 2010s: Limbo in 2010 and Inside, a horror-tinged science fiction story, in 2016. In an interview, Patti said about Playdead’s production philosophy: “It’s all about having projects which run the company. When new ideas emerge, we get bigger. If we don’t have any ideas, we get smaller.” Both Limbo and Inside are considered near-masterpieces of independent gaming, but there’s no word yet on if or when Playdead will make another game.

[7] Some of these included giving Limbo a multiplayer component, creating multiple difficulty levels, and—most hilarious—giving the boy a mustache so he’d look older and his gory deaths wouldn’t be as disturbing.

[8] You can read this literally. Jensen wanted Limbo to be released for free. It ultimately was made available for purchase at $15.

[9] With Jensen in particular, you might question why he entered the world of video games in the first place. In one interview, when asked which games he admires, Jensen takes a moment before saying he thinks a good game only comes out every two years. He liked Braid (a 2008 indie title) and Ico (an artsy 2001 PS2 game) and Half-Life (a 1998 PC shooter widely considered one of the greatest, most influential games ever made). And that’s all. Does this guy even like games? If not, is that why he’s so good at making them?

[10] In the ongoing war between Sony and Microsoft for hardcore console supremacy, the one thing Microsoft’s Xbox had over PlayStation was Microsoft’s sturdy support of independent games. The Xbox’s online store, in 2010 called the Xbox Live Arcade, hosted a “Summer of Arcade” promotion every year when gamers could score discounts and special access to some of the year’s most anticipated indie titles. The tradition began in 2008 with Braid and World of Goo as headliners, but after a bit of a down year for indie games in 2009, Limbo was the big fish of 2010’s event. This endorsement from Microsoft, plus universal acclaim from gaming media, made Limbo a runaway commercial hit on top of a critical darling.

[11] Adventure games saw huge rifts along console lines, with PlayStation gamers thumping their chests to the tune of God of War while Nintendo stans raised banners for the more fanciful, cartoonish The Legend of Zelda series. In fact, Zelda saw polarity in its own right in the 2010s when it diverted from the previous decade’s detail-focused art design in games like Twilight Princess to a more cel-shaded approach in its handheld titles and an impressionistic aesthetic for Nintendo Wii swan song Skyward Sword and Nintendo Switch launch title Breath of the Wild.

[12] Not to editorialize, but as good as Forza might be, it doesn’t have shit on Mario Kart. Call when a FIFA or Madden game is as fun as Mario Tennis, too.

[13] Battlefield emerged as the franchise of choice for people who wanted a more true-feeling shooter, while Call of Duty became the go-to game for people who wanted everyone to know they were a douchebag.

[14] Cuphead, Hotline Miami, Bastion, Fez, The Binding of Isaac, Don’t Starve, and Kentucky Route Zero are all good examples of games that incorporate unique art styles in ways that elevate their gameplay.

[15] A brutal, fast-playing platformer that’s like if Mario smoked meth and crack at the same time.

[16] This game’s nasty. Every time you stop moving, time stops. Every time you move, time resumes. Most enemies have guns, so you’re in effect in a constant slo-mo scene a la The Matrix.

[17] One of the most divisive indie titles of the decade, Gone Home is either one of gaming’s most beautiful narrative accomplishments or a “walking simulator,” depending on whom you ask. In the game, your character returns home on a dark and stormy night to find her family missing and a note left by her sister saying: “Katie, I'm sorry I can't be there to see you, but it is impossible. Please, please don't go digging around trying to find out where I am. I don't want Mom and Dad anyone to know. We'll see each other again some day. Don't be worried. I love you.” For the next two hours, you just walk around the house and look at things and try to piece together what happened. For my money, it’s one of the best stories ever tucked inside a video game and an essential experience.

[18] Telltale Games came closest to this level of influence in the 2010s thanks to its episodic, choice-based games based on IP like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. These games were so successful Telltale began working with Netflix in 2018 to adapt their Minecraft: Story Mode game into an interactive show for the streaming service, as well as turn Stranger Things into a game. However, in late 2018, Telltale blindsided just about everyone—including their own employees—with the news they were undergoing a “majority studio closure” in the face of severe financial trouble. They laid off 90 percent of their workforce, and not in a clean manner. Right after the announcement, some employees were told they had 30 minutes to vacate their offices. It seems behind the scenes, Telltale was tanking, likely because it had stretched itself too far between too many projects (at the time, they were working on “seasons” for their Game of Thrones game, their Walking Dead game, Minecraft, Stranger Things, and The Wolf Among Us). They tried to operate at a AAA scale and, whatever the real reason, failed in catastrophic fashion.