Think Limbo’s too short? You’re missing the point entirely

If a hunger for sights and sounds is the player’s general motive to forge on, there are more definite incentives in the touches of life and hope that intersperse the scissor-jawed traps, the louring chimneys and electrified surfaces. White butterflies linger over patches of weed; serene, uplifting tones emerge from the ambient score. And of course, there’s the girl, first glimpsed around halfway through – a slight, averted silhouette amid long grass and flecks of light, Limbo’s Princess Peach, the symbolic opposite of decay and predation.

Haunted by these instants of radiance and beauty, it’s easy to aspire beyond Limbo’s fallen realm, easy to look through the shadow of the game’s narrative arch in the telltale repetitions of certain shapes. A stabbing spider’s leg reappears as a mechanical joint, lever-operated by one of your silent adversaries. The enormous, sizzling letters of the word ‘HOTEL’, themselves a metaphor for transience, in-betweenness, must be navigated twice.

The spider is truly loathsome, unfolding its limbs from the darkness in the corners of the screen.

Complaints that the oppressive atmosphere lapses in the game’s latter half fail to account for the way the Dante-esque forest subtly persists, itself a party to the theologically inflected premise of recurrence. Stepping down from a rusting iron ladder, you’ll be surprised by the crush of grass underfoot, and the slant of pine needles in the backdrop. And it’s to the forest that you ultimately, body and soul, return.

The tale winds up in a burst of what seems to be broken glass, the boy tumbling through a wall at the climax of a sequence of bewildering gravity reversals, rolling to lie in the same deathly attitude from which you first roused him, with a tentative tap of A button. Another, final tap reopens his eyes (‘pissholes in the snow’, as AATG’s Richard Horne memorably describes them), and he climbs to his feet, ready to resume his tireless voyage to the right.

On the hillside above, a glimmering. It is the girl. She has her back turned as before, Orpheus-like, hands busy around something in the grass. A ladder dangles from the bough, promising perhaps an ascent of a less physical nature. The boy slowly approaches; is redemption at hand?

She starts. He halts. Darkness falls. The credits fade in. And dawning gradually behind them, the shape of what has been there from the beginning, the menu screen’s shadowy backdrop: the tree, its smooth curves now hung with growths; the ladder, rotten through, one rung dangling; and where the two children stood, two identical columns of flies, busy around something in the grass.

The Stygian boat trip affords a moment of reflection.

Optimistic interpretations of this abrupt, macabre denouement have been proposed. Over at Ars Technica, it has been suggested that the girl and boy ultimately escape Limbo together, abandoning their flesh along with the world itself. The reason, in my opinion, that this view is unsustainable makes its second appearance shortly after the credits. ‘Play’. Within a few seconds of concluding, you can reawaken the protagonist from death, begin the cycle of futility anew. You don’t even have to do this for the implications to hold weight – it’s enough simply to know that the option is there.

Limbo is bookended with death, with corpses underfoot. The intervening chain of events is the player’s failure to realise this fact, or – if he or she is alert to the title’s connotations – to accept it. And the horror of it all is something a game is uniquely gifted to express because a game, unlike any other artform, has ‘replay value’.

A game is an innately ‘purgatorial’ structure, a closed loop of actions and experiences that can be relived, again and again, in different ways, but for that very reason never resolved, doomed eventually to be left in the rot. This is why quibbles over length ring a little hollow. Films and books end; games do not, not as long as the player is obstinate enough to keep going. Playdead has converted this essential attribute into an existential tragedy.