bler144: I'm contemplating ditching LIMBO. 2 hours in, 23/39 levels complete.
While I don't use the term in RL, it totally feels like I'm hate****ing this game. At this point I'm continuing mostly just because I don't want the damn game to have the satisfaction.
The conceits seem to be:
-Visually everything is black/white/gray, so puzzle solutions often come down to determining which shadows are important and which are just shadows - which vines are for climbing and which vines are just...well, not decorative, but present.
-The game wants you to die.
Which is fine to a point, but in a few circumstances you'll be locked out of a solution and just stand there for 10-15 waiting for the water to catch up and kill you. Sometimes you'll have to kill yourself to go back 10-15 sec without having to reload even farther back.
But solutions often feel arbitrary - one puzzle will kill you for not reacting instantly to sudden movement, where the next puzzle will kill you precisely for reacting instantly to movement. A gap that looks too wide to jump sometimes is and sometimes isn't, but you won't know unless you either try (and perhaps die) or run around ruling out other solutions first.
Edit - case in point, there is a puzzle where there are two depressions you must cross with a button in the center of each one. In one you will die if you step in the depression but are safe on the button; in the other the converse is true. As best I can tell there are no cues to tell you which is which. You get to cross it once, and then for whatever reason you get to run back through it the other way with shadowy figures chasing you. There's absolutely nothing "hard" about it, you just either read the designer's mind, or you repeat the sequence.
With a few exceptions, these aren't really "puzzles" as much as just trial and error sequences. If x kills you this time, for the most part it's going to be stupidly easy to do y instead, and then you'll cruise on until you hit the next binary decision tree.
The "brain worm" sequences are often annoying. While I've figured out how they actually work (beat the first few just by stumbling around, appropriately), in the vein of legions of PvP complainers on various boards, losing control of your character and having them die in front of your eyes while you bang on the keyboard with no recourse is, by and large, generally not a fun mechanic for a lot of players.
The controls aren't awesome, but other than a few hiccups they're not terrible either. Story, at least to this point is non-existent and you're wandering through environmental hazards and dart-blowing enemies...because something.
The creator(s) definitely spent a lot of time on the often-creative and elaborate death sequences, which I guess is great and all if your goal in playing is to see your character die in new and exciting ways. Or drown. Again.
But by and large it feels like I'm just trouble-shooting a computer - there's been few puzzles with a "A-ha!" moment of celebration - they're either obvious, or largely trial-and-deatherror, occasionally leaving me shaking my head in disbelief at the solution the designers decided was the "right" one.
With only 2ish hours to go, presumably, I'll probably finish at some point when I decide I want to distract myself by focusing on really hating something intensely.
