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00:00:01
S1 Ep7: Limbo
66 Plays8 years ago
Dave and Jake's opinions are stuck somewhere in the middle in this week's episode of Soapstone!
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Transcript
Introduction to Soapstone Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello one and all, and welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I am joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. Hello. How are you doing tonight, Dave? I'm tired. You're tired? Yeah. Has been a heck of a weekend.
00:00:16
Speaker
That's strong language for Jake. Yeah, sorry. I'll cut that line. Don't worry about that. I'm not going to leave that one in.
Introducing Limbo by PlayDead
00:00:23
Speaker
But today, we're going to talk about a game we both played very recently, although it did not come out very recently, Limbo. And many of you may have heard of this. This was a 2010 release by PlayDead. And I had played this in the past. I know you didn't play it, Dave. You played one of the more recent games before, Inside, right? Yeah, that's correct.
00:00:45
Speaker
But I played inside having played this one, so it kind of changed the way I came at the game. Going into this, what were your expectations of the game having already played inside?
00:00:58
Speaker
Inside being a, I mean, I really liked their art style as far as the studio goes for the games they've made. But I was expecting it since it was the first iteration to just be a worse version of Inside, where I mean, they hadn't quite found their voice or before they actually got budget. So I expected it to be a little more simplistic, I guess. And I was not disappointed per se.
00:01:23
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't have much in the way of complicated mechanics.
Expectations and Mechanics
00:01:27
Speaker
It is a 2D side-scroller puzzle kind of exploration type game, but it's all linear. You can tell they're both made by the same company. There are kinds of games where they incorporate some more mechanics into each puzzle and expect you to kind of intuitively figure some things out.
00:01:45
Speaker
And sometimes that leads to puzzles where you'll be stuck on it for like quite a while until you find that one simple solution that just was the key all along. Yeah, I hate to say it because I consider myself decent at puzzle games. By no means great because there are some games I've not gone back to and just said fuck it. But there were some times where I was like, oh, let me do this puzzle. I don't have a vague idea of what to do.
00:02:08
Speaker
And I'd be like a millisecond off of my timing for something. And I would do the same thing about seven times and be like, well, we'll get it eventually. Yeah, I can't deny that. Well, we'll get to that a little bit later.
Art Style and Atmosphere
00:02:21
Speaker
So before we go too far into this, this is a complete spoiler episode.
00:02:26
Speaker
uh if you have any interest in the story however much of it is there we are going to give our interpretations if they exist of what this game means and so no holds barred this time uh if you play you'll have to play for the gameplay after listening to this and we'd love to hear your thoughts as well please leave um your thoughts on the game and the meeting behind it in the comments below thank you yes or just say them aloud we're listening
00:02:57
Speaker
But to start this off here, the art style of Limbo is probably the most iconic part about it. Just looking at the art for the title screen to cover anything like that, you know exactly that this is essentially a black and white game. I wouldn't even say essentially it is a black and white game. It is a black and white game. At its essence it is. And also all throughout a black and white game.
00:03:24
Speaker
right out the gate the the world is very dreary right like if you only have two colors it's right I mean you could be sharp with two colors though right yeah it is very blurred very hazy I would say yeah I would agree it's there's kind of this depth of field kind of on the edges of the screen so everything appears a little bit out of focus if you're not looking at your character it's not it's not very serious but
Gameplay and Exploration
00:03:51
Speaker
The world is not well defined in that aspect. Like you said, it's blurry or hazy. And to just start off, there's no tutorial, there's nothing like that. It's just the game starts and you have to figure out essentially the controls.
00:04:08
Speaker
It's not too hard, but in that regard it's sort of like Mario where you just you drop somewhere Mm-hmm, and you know typically for any platform where you go from left to right, right? That's about it There is an achievement if you go the other way I did get that achievement Yeah, cuz I played enough games where it's instinct to check certain niche corners big but there's probably something here I would put something here, right? I
00:04:32
Speaker
So, at its core, there's not a whole lot provided. There's literally nothing provided for you for the story, right? Yeah, there's no dialogue between you and the other people or things you encounter in the world. Nothing's friendly, really. This is true. There's a few things that don't try to kill you, but those are far and few between.
00:04:53
Speaker
Yeah, almost everything is a death trap. Yeah, it's true. There's kind of starting off.
The Spider Encounter
00:05:00
Speaker
You just walk along, right? But it's not long before you start to encounter obstacles or things in your path. The most interesting, I think, of that was the spider earlier of the game. You could talk about the spider if you want. Explain what he does. I don't like spiders, so yeah.
00:05:23
Speaker
It's something I had to get over just a little bit. It wasn't like a well-defined spider, which helps. It is uncomfortable. It is 100% uncomfortable because the game forces you to interact with it. Basically, you're walking to a point, you see all these what seem like legs coming out from behind a tree, which is maybe skeptical because trees don't typically have legs. Not usually. Except for those ones in Africa.
00:05:43
Speaker
Right. But you also see... Que toto. You do see a bear trap in the tree above. Maybe I can use that. As you walk up the spider, it kind of extends its legs and tries to stomp on you while still remaining in its position. It's really more of a stab, to be fair. Everything it does is stab. A stab, a stomp. Yeah. Flunt weapon versus a piercing. I don't know. Yeah.
00:06:13
Speaker
But eventually the bear trap does get knocked down and then you can essentially relocate it so when it does Stab its leg down. Yeah, it'll hit the bear trap instead of you because it's not It's not trying that hard. It's just like can't can I get can I go? Yeah, and then you destroy a couple legs He's like hey fuck this and leaves and then you can just go past the spider
00:06:33
Speaker
And the spider is kind of like a reoccurring antagonist. Honestly, it's basically the only true antagonist in the game. There's other things that are kind of in your way, but because the spider recurs, it's the closest thing to the antagonist that the game has.
00:06:49
Speaker
Yeah, I was not expecting it more than once. I was like, hey, I got him. Got that spider puzzle. Yeah. And then he comes back later with, I think, three less legs. They removed three or four. And he starts chasing you and you have to just path correctly and get from point A to point B without getting stabbed.
00:07:08
Speaker
Yeah, and it's a full escape sequence. If at any point you kind of slow down or you lag behind a little bit, it'll kind of position its leg like it's preparing to stab you. And if you don't move, it actually does stab you, which is a good time to mention. This game is, even though it's just black and white, it is actually quite violent.
00:07:32
Speaker
Every time you die in the game, it usually has a reload point, not long before, but the deaths can be very gruesome. If you die in a bear trap, it can chop your head off. You can be impaled by a spider. You can't swim, so anytime there's water and you jump in deep water, if you land in deep water, you're gonna drown. Which is like, you know, two feet high because this kid is very small. Yeah, he's like a young kid. He's probably like seven, eight, something like that.
00:07:58
Speaker
But yeah, the deaths are very pronounced. Like every time you die, I think it lasts for about... I'd say like a good seven seconds, where three of it is death animation and the four is it slowly fading to black saying...
00:08:12
Speaker
Yeah, and sometimes you can use that to gather some more information about a puzzle or what you could have done differently. You can reload faster if you just tap the jump button, but that becomes available after like two seconds. I'll keep that in mind if I ever speedrun it. Yes, yeah, it's good to know. In some situations the game
00:08:31
Speaker
you might be in a spot where you're trying to get timing exactly correct. So I died a lot in life life here again. I didn't remember all the puzzles, so I needed to reload as quick as possible in those cases. But yeah, the spider continues to chase you, and the game's pretty brutal in how you and the spider deal with each other, right?
00:08:56
Speaker
where it constantly kills you and you run like a little bitch. Yes, mostly that. But it does finally kind of reach a crescendo where you turn the tables on the spider a bit, right? Yeah. Specifically, I think he's down to one leg at this point.
Violence and Child Characters
00:09:15
Speaker
He's just kind of crawling after you in a very... Who's the hand from the Addams family? Oh, I don't actually remember. I don't know the name.
00:09:23
Speaker
But it's a very comical thing. We're just kind of like moving one finger if you imagine it across. I think you drop a boulder on it first. That's what it gets. The second time. Yeah. So I was like, I got it for real this time. Again, I was wrong.
00:09:37
Speaker
but you go up and just like Delfino Plaza, you, you pull the leg off it as a rise in agony. Yeah. There's some like separating tendons sort of, it's pretty gruesome. Um, but then you have a spider lake. So can I have that to inventory user proposals later? No, it's gigantic. This thing's huge compared to you. It's, I don't know if we get it indicated correctly. This is a giant spider. Things like, you know, 20 feet tall, essentially compared to, you know, it's, it's crazy.
00:10:05
Speaker
And for the record, you don't actually have items in the game, so you cannot pole vault. That's not part of the puzzle mechanics. Cannot use the leg. But then the very next section is there's a gap in the ground with some spikes in it that you can't clear. And now that you've ripped its leg off, you go back and you push the torso of the spider into this.
00:10:23
Speaker
pit so you can jump across it. And there's actually this humming in the background of buzzing when the spider is near that grows louder when it grows closer to you. I was trying to pay more attention to the audio cues this time. And until you actually push the torso onto the spikes and it just kind of bleeds out and dies, the humming continues. So it's not dead until the very end and then it stops and it doesn't come back in the game.
00:10:49
Speaker
Yeah. There was a small part of me that was worried that would try and just bite me with his little little teeth or something. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's it's pretty it's there to make you uncomfortable because you have to even to the very end where you're like grabbing the leg to like pull it off finally and finish the spider off. If you like mistime that it will stab you. It can kill you with one leg left. Like there's no end of ways to die in this game.
00:11:16
Speaker
it's again i'll keep saying surprisingly unforgiving for things now part of that is you learn as you go maybe certain trap trick oh i didn't realize that was there oh maybe i need to go left before i go right type thing but then there are other times where it seems it was more the game being or handling a little bit clumsy yeah versus me fucking up which i'll admit i did a lot
00:11:41
Speaker
Yeah, there's more I think it's fair to say that there's the gamer lies on the fact that you can reload so quickly to account for some otherwise Otherwise, it would be unfair deaths. Yeah, there's several never fun in any game. Yeah
00:11:57
Speaker
There's some portions where there's really no expectation that you would be able to get it the first pass and you kind of have to come back. Like, for instance, you're rolling down a hill or like sliding down a hill and you have to make a jump at the end. Yeah. Maybe like activate a switch, which I'll have to do later. And I think that's the first time the game introduces the switch that it like plays with the gravity mechanic about. I think the first time you actually interact with one of the switches, it's in the air after you've slid down, like,
00:12:26
Speaker
Yeah, I thought it was part of the background, not the foreground. I actually completed the game. I still forgot. I died several times before I remembered. So that's an example of a situation where the game kind of messed up. But other than the spiders, there are very few other characters in the game. One of them is the other children who invariably all try to kill you. Try to kill you and run away from you.
00:12:50
Speaker
Yeah, like they're setting bear traps, throwing burning tires at me, they have spears, and occasionally blow darts. Yeah, they're pretty bad. The game doesn't jump into any of their motivations really other than they are inherently distrustful of outsiders of which you are one. Yeah, it seems like you're going into a
00:13:10
Speaker
tree house area. It doesn't seem like you're invading their space. They have a mechanical spider at the beginning to kind of like scare people off. It looks very similar actually to the first time you encounter the spider, but it's got these. You can see the joints and the IBM's and whatnot.
00:13:29
Speaker
It's really not that dangerous. It's just there to make you very uncomfortable after your first encounters with a spider. And you've already mostly dealt with a spider, I believe, at this point. The spider dies, I think, after you encounter the kids for the first time because it actually kills one of the kids, at least as it's like running behind you. It's got one of them kind of like impaled and throws it. It's a little... This isn't the kid I want. I want that kid. Yeah. It's a little gruesome.
00:13:54
Speaker
And ultimately, after you deal with all these kids' traps, they kind of try to take a run at you, several of them. And you had to... This is another example of the time the game is definitely unfair. There is a smashing, like, pressure plate, basically, about who's gonna press down, smash you. And the area to the left and to the right of it is slightly depressed. And the trick is that... Hey, I feel you, buddy.
00:14:23
Speaker
Yeah. The trick is that the pressure plate is the safe spot and the depressed areas aren't. Yeah. So the first time it's like instinct, you see something above, you're like, that's probably going to smash down to press this button. Don't touch the button. Yeah. So you don't touch the button. You get smashed. You're well played. So you go through and there's another one.
00:14:43
Speaker
You're like, okay. It looks very, let me just stay on the button again. Cause the pressed areas are not safe. And that one's smashes you. Yeah. So that one time they reversed it and decided to the left and the right are dangerous or safe in that case in the pressure pace, actually. Um, but right after that, these kids attack you. They're like, you know, chasing out with spears and they'll kill you if you're, you know, in range. They'll kill you.
00:15:05
Speaker
Yeah, so you have to run backwards. Several of them like miss a jump and like fall to their death. Other ones continue to chase you and die to the traps. And it's kind of, it's interesting that the game kind of goes there to a certain extent because there's definitely a taboo and you can argue rightfully so in the industry about, you know, depicting children being harmed. One of the things when I was doing some research for this,
00:15:30
Speaker
the creator for the game. Some of his investors came forward and were like, hey, it's a little bit serious. Like we don't really want to see a kid get hurt. Could you slap a mustache on him? Literally ask that. Yeah, pretty much. I guess to denote has hit puberty adolescent enough to be murdered.
00:15:55
Speaker
Just because there's how would you even depict that as like a black character like a shadow image, right? Yeah, there's a white mustache or something. I don't know. It's it's ridiculous, right? It would have completely changed the tone of the game.
00:16:09
Speaker
but people were very uncomfortable with it. He did stick to his guns and the game got pretty much 9 out of 10 from almost everybody who reviewed it on launch in 2010. Yeah, it is an uncomfortable game at times, even for me. I've played a lot of violent games, somewhat desensitized. Some of those deaths just make you a little bit uncomfortable. It's like, kind of- The Tomb Raider, the rebooted Tomb Raider series is one example. Exactly.
00:16:34
Speaker
You feel uncomfortable if you see the person who just got impaled flail about a little bit and then die. Nobody... I'd like to believe. Nobody really wants to see that, you know.
00:16:45
Speaker
Yeah. But if you have a character just evaporate into dust, you're like, oh, they've been raptured. Got me. Backstab mechanics are messed up. But anyways, so those are the other primary characters. There's a couple other times we'll run across in some of the puzzles, like a few other creatures. There's a giant mosquito.
00:17:06
Speaker
And that one actually isn't trying to hurt you. It'll actually try to avoid you. You have to sneak up on it and then grab its leg and ultimately rip one of them off. But it's not trying to hurt you, so...
00:17:20
Speaker
I think the guy just has a thing for ripping off lights. He does, yeah. That's what I'm thinking. Yeah, the game doesn't really provide much for you in the way of story.
Puzzles and Mechanics
00:17:28
Speaker
You have the title, you have the kid, you have constantly moving forward, and then they do play with your mobility in several parts of the game, right?
00:17:38
Speaker
Yep. One of the mechanics is putting some parasite on your head and it will force you to go one direction. You can hold the other direction to slow your movement forward, but you will keep going until you die. Or if you hit a light source, it says, ah, fuck light and I'll turn you around. Hey light, screw this on. So sometimes you need to go to a light source to be able to turn around to go back.
00:18:05
Speaker
So a lot of the puzzles that use this parasite involve setting up the state of the puzzle beforehand so that this parasite doesn't just put you in a death situation. Like you prep a crate or something to jump over.
00:18:20
Speaker
Things like that. And then there's these like grubs that will eat the parasite off of you. Yeah, you have to jump on some box typically and jump high enough and then just eat it. And you're just like, well, I'm good now. No harm done. Blood seeping out on top of your skull. NBD, NBD. Everything's fine.
00:18:41
Speaker
I'll be honest, I really did not like that mechanic. Yeah. The game seemed clumsy enough as it is to then also restrict your movement by how you have to do this. I'm like, okay. Though, did you catch having played inside before this? It's almost definitely the inspiration for the mind control mechanic. Yeah.
00:19:05
Speaker
Where you get the helmet and then control something on some, some other guys. Yeah. I much preferred that. It seemed like an extra layer of puzzle solving. Whereas this seemed like just like a hurdle. Yeah. I understand. It's still like a puzzle solving mechanic to add complexity, but it wasn't one that I really enjoyed. That's fair. Yeah.
00:19:27
Speaker
There's several pieces they kind of combine here, and the second part of the game, we don't need to go into as much detail on, but essentially the game is broken out into the forest, some water puzzles, kind of transitioning into a factory, and then the final section is a factory. Two factories.
00:19:49
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Two factors. And the water puzzles are like, all right. There's some kind of macabre puzzle solving there. I think the most kind of out there solution as far as making things uncomfortable is the first time you're introduced to like the brain parasite, the worm thing. It's on a kid who runs into the water and drowns. Already kind of bad.
00:20:12
Speaker
Jump on his body to clear the pond You then have to fish one of the corpses out of the pond and use it to trigger a pressure plate to proceed and that's basically That's basically as far as the game goes. I think using other kids corpses to solve puzzles and move forward
00:20:31
Speaker
Later on I kept looking through the game saying is there any kid corpses or boxes I can use here. Yeah All right first search it for corpses then boxes. I found it alive kid Oh, I can kill the kid put on the pressure. Got it. Got it. The game doesn't have that thankfully Yeah, it does have that kind of common commonality between both games are these kind of Seemingly insurmountable puzzles that have a solution that once you realize that you're like got it, of course
00:21:00
Speaker
And I think Playdead really excels at that. Because sometimes it's really easy to be like, you need this item to proceed in the game. If you don't have this item, then that's just obviously blocked. A door, a key, a boomerang, whatever, a hookshot.
00:21:18
Speaker
Man, really targeting Halo there. Yeah, I know. An energy sword. Common solution to a lot of problems. But it's more difficult from a game design perspective to give the player all of the options or give them the same toolkit because literally the controls for this game are like move around, jump, and grab. That's it. Yeah. And then present them with compelling puzzles on top of that.
Pacing and Themes
00:21:47
Speaker
I think the most interesting, because the game starts off with this whole open kind of, I think the pacing was better in the early with some of the puzzles. They had the spider and also the creator had arachnophobia as a child. That's the reason the spiders are just a little aside. I feel like the pacing was better towards the end is almost nonstop puzzles and little else in the way of development. It's just like, please let me get some progress.
00:22:18
Speaker
yeah there didn't seem to be quite as much like you're saying towards the end because you weren't really interacting with any other creatures or people yeah you're just going through the factory as we mentioned and dealing with ships in perspective as things start rotating around that was my favorite it was it was cool i liked it i actually had forgotten about that and i was playing through again and it's essentially you flip a switch and the entire world rotates
00:22:47
Speaker
And you have to traverse a puzzle while literally everything is spinning around you. It's got this kind of stuck in the machine type feel for it. It's not like a twirly whirly. It's a very slow turn. A lot of times it'll indicate like, hey, there's a boulder here.
00:23:06
Speaker
And as you are going and things are rotating clockwise, at some point the boulder will dislodge and come down to where you are. So progress correctly and don't get hit by it. Basically.
00:23:20
Speaker
But the it does just kind of accelerate in the puzzles. A lot of puzzles. Finally get to the end. And the final puzzle is gravity at this point is fluctuating between North and South. So you're flying to the top of the... Can we use up and down? North and South is not a...
00:23:40
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I mean, for a 2D game anyway. Yes. Maybe we are only going north or south. We only go east and west. Yeah. Going up and down. And basically the trick is you have to fly into the air, hit a switch when gravity switches to keep going down. And the switch changes gravity to go... The direction is pointing, basically. Yeah, to the right of the screen.
00:24:08
Speaker
And it'll fling you through a glass pane. And then the game goes into slow motion as you like tumble. Insanely slow motion. Very slow. Because it's otherwise, you know, how would you know this was important? It would be weird. There's only one other part in the game where you have to like break through a glass pane and at least that was vertical.
00:24:30
Speaker
But it really emphasizes this and I think so this is where we're getting into what we think the game means. My take on this from the first time I played it is that the entire game is limbo.
00:24:42
Speaker
Did you drive that from the title? Yes. Yeah, I'd agree with you there, for sure. And that the fact that the game puts so much emphasis on you flying through the window at the end is indicative, in my mind, in my headcanon, you were in an accident. Maybe you didn't have your seatbelt on. Kid flies through the window and is dying on the street, basically, when all of this happens.
00:25:07
Speaker
The other character and I'll ask what what your opinion on is it too? but the other character I neglected to mention is there's a girl who's Like interacting with something on the ground or like mourning it appears to me and you meet encounter two times in the game the first time you almost reach her and then Make she gets body doubled basically. Yeah, it's kind of like blocked and You encounter her at the end of the game after flying through the window
00:25:37
Speaker
Conveniently at the end of the game where you have gone through the glass and find her again, it is also the start of the game. Yeah. Kind of emphasizing this perpetual loop that your character is in. Yeah. And I think, I mean, pretty clear.
00:25:56
Speaker
limbo, right? You're stuck in transition. I'll ask you what your thoughts are kind of about what the game might have been about. Thank you for queuing up two questions for me. Yeah, I know. I'm gonna go get some coffee. I'll let you answer now and come back. Sip noises. I usually have a drink now, so that would have been appropriate, but I don't.
00:26:20
Speaker
Yeah, this is the first time I don't think we drank during the podcast. Right. We're usually pretty wasted by the end. Yeah, you do drink a lot of alcohol and party juice. Yeah.
00:26:34
Speaker
inside joke I don't drink and I do yes he said with a heavy heart and a barely functioning liberty I'm just kidding hey provides master pressure plates though yeah it's useful
00:26:56
Speaker
But I was gonna say what I think adds or lends credence to your theory is as you're going through the factory, as we've dubbed it, there's a lot of gears and rotating of the environment.
00:27:10
Speaker
So if you think of the kid being launched out of the glass as being thrown out of the car, the car kind of turns spun off the road and is essentially doing like a death roll. He's like flying through the air. Before he gets thrown out. Or the car itself is spinning. Interesting. I actually hadn't considered that.
00:27:29
Speaker
Neither had I, but thankfully a Wikipedia article. What are you talking about, Dave? We're leading the research team on what the meaning of this game is. Check out this brand new game. Here are my thoughts and opinions. The other thing, which I actually didn't notice until the beginning, is at the beginning of the game, there's the sound of this wind in the background.
00:27:50
Speaker
I'd always taken it as went, but I paid attention to it this time, having been a time I'm replaying the game. And I think it might actually just be the sound of cars passing on the road, distantly. Because there's this kind of vague distance filter to all the sound you're experiencing at the start of the game. And it sounds really similar to just being on the side of the road and hearing cars pass.
00:28:17
Speaker
interesting yeah because it would cause wind right but it's periodic it's not like a constant blowing of the wind it's
00:28:26
Speaker
things just going by. I must go back and check that out because it's something I definitely would have overlooked as this is my first playthrough. Right, yeah. But I believe that's my take on it. The game does have a bunch of hidden things, secrets, achievements, things like that. I'm not too interested in that. I'm usually playing a game for the story or content, as the case may be.
Speculations on Story
00:28:51
Speaker
But it is there Such a thing such a thing interests you and you want to go through and play it So you mentioned before my thoughts on the girl. Yeah, I Will say she is the only girl that you see in the game and she's also the beginning in the end So I think the theory is that your sister who's in the car. Yeah, I think so And there's some speculation as
00:29:17
Speaker
to if they had both died at the same time, or if he got stuck in limbo, or went after her or something.
00:29:26
Speaker
And another thing to note is all of the other human characters you encounter in the game are full black silhouettes. Right. Whereas your character is a full black silhouette who has white eyes. Right. Which is very important in several parts. Yeah. So when you first wake up in the game, you're laying on the ground, you see the eyes and then he gets up and then you can gain control of the character, move around.
00:29:51
Speaker
And then when he's thrown out of the mer-bricks through the glass at the end, and he's on the ground again, a very similar thing happens, where initially, all dark, you don't see his eyes, and then he opens his eyes, and continues on.
00:30:06
Speaker
Yeah, it is really interesting. I hadn't really thought about the possibility she had died before. She's already in limbo. I thought that, like, when you encounter her the first time and you get pulled away, I thought that's because she was alive and you couldn't reach her. Like you're trying to cross planes? Yeah, like you're trying to, like, connect with somebody that you know and you care about, but that's impossible. You're not there. This is where psychic would come in handy.
00:30:34
Speaker
Right? At the end of the game, though, when you approach her the second time, she is, you know, stuck in her kind of like animation loop of examining something on the ground. But at the very last moment before it like cuts to the credits, she raises her head in attentiveness, she hears you approach, which means she probably is dead, at least by the end of the game.
00:30:59
Speaker
And it's just, it's really interesting how you can take just these little things and then build the connecting pieces of the story from it. There's other games like this. Dave, our only listener is hyper conservative.
00:31:16
Speaker
I realize I use sarcasm as a defense mechanism way too much. But other games have kind of like done this and I think maybe to a better extent, I mean, Inside does the same thing. They give you a bunch of pieces and they're like, hey, what do you think this means?
00:31:35
Speaker
That's something I haven't looked up after the fact Because when I played inside it was much more of a case of I have no idea what the fuck's going on Yeah, it does a really good job of setting the environment it seems not post-apocalyptic, but I
00:31:54
Speaker
I'm not sure even what the good part of the topia would be. It's just all bad. It's like tapioca all bad. Actually one of our listeners does like tapioca. Oh jeez. Ultra conservative tapioca eater. We despise you. We should cancel this podcast.
00:32:13
Speaker
There's other games like that. There's Braid kind of leaves things open, but gives you a lot of pieces about what is going on and what it means. But I feel like that game constructs it better. It actually has an overarching plot and reasons why. It still gives it to you piecemeal, but it actually does give you something. Whereas Inside and Limbo, you have nothing but theories and what's going on with the visuals or the audio cues, as you mentioned.
00:32:39
Speaker
to kind of strip almost all of that back and just let you have a raw emotional reaction to what's going on. Whether that be frustration because the puzzle is imprecise and you're really struggling to hit the timings or your connection to what few characters the games give you.
00:32:57
Speaker
I feel that I probably would have had a better experience had I initially played it when it came out and then gone to inside and be like, oh, I see what they've changed and improved for this. But going back, it was definitely a struggle. I felt like I was pushing through it to a degree.
00:33:15
Speaker
Yeah. Well, we were also on a time frame. We wanted to play this game and talk about it. Yeah. But, I don't know. I think our impressions are still probably pretty accurate to it. They would have been, how do we... Oh, second playthrough from me, but had you played it probably in 2010. Unless you just hadn't played anything for a long time and you're just like, I just want to play absolutely anything. Like, I'm just starved for video games. I feel like you probably would have had some of the same gripes.
00:33:44
Speaker
Yeah. I assume you didn't have as many gripes as me. I didn't. I will say that having played through the game again, the pacing got to me more this time. And maybe you got like a little preview on the pacing because you were kind of, you know, trying to finish this game for the podcast.
00:34:02
Speaker
The pacing is not great. There's like just clusters and clusters of puzzles to the end with like very little breathing room between them and Toward the beginning there's a lot more walking like internalizing what the world's like like it's important when you play a game like this where there could be emotional highs and lows like when you're dealing with a spider or using a kid's corpse to solve a puzzle you give them some time after that to like
00:34:28
Speaker
Even if they're not consciously going back and digesting what they just did, they're unconsciously doing that.
00:34:34
Speaker
You just have some time to let it set. Exactly. Like a nice flan. It's like, if you're playing a game like Amnesia, which, you know, some of us have played in the past, you need highs and lows. If it was just running from things all the time, you'd just be like, well, this is a running from things game. And you wouldn't like be scared of that anymore because you're always running from things. Yeah. Do you remember the movie 2012? Yeah, I didn't see it, but I remember it.
00:35:02
Speaker
I didn't either, but there are some jokes about it and online criticism, but essentially it's just a disaster movie where it is a constant chase scene for lava and other destruction happening and they keep the runaway in a car or on foot and then in a plane and a boat. It's all these things that just nonstop action.
00:35:24
Speaker
Now, maybe that is a thing that some people enjoy. Right. But even with, like, transporter movies, there's still something else to go with it that breaks it up. Right. It kind of makes it cohesive. If you're always at a flat out sprint, how are people going to have any chance to see anything? Right. How are people going to breathe? Hashtag asthma. Yeah, that's rough.
00:35:44
Speaker
But I think for you Something like John Wick obviously an action movie. Mm-hmm, but there's a lot of other pieces to it Which makes it a cohesive story, right? And it would have been nice to see something similar like that
00:36:05
Speaker
I want John Wick instead of Lindo, basically. And I think Inside actually hits on some of the bakeries of the game in a better way. So instead of giving you almost nothing, it gives you some things.
Limbo's Impact on PlayDead
00:36:20
Speaker
and it gives you questions. But yeah, I think that overall, Limbo was a great step in development. I'm glad it was really successful for the developers and they went on to make enough money. They bought their company back from investors, so they had creative control going forward with games like Inside.
00:36:39
Speaker
And it's good to see success stories like that. There's not a whole lot of puzzle games out there that get a lot of traction, especially in the indie scene. So I don't usually play that many puzzle games. I usually don't play that many platformers. The fact that I'll play games that's both of those is a testament to how engaging it can be.
00:37:01
Speaker
I would definitely say it's a good game, but I would also say that it's not my game. Like I said, initially I was going in with lower expectations compared to Inside, but... 0 out of 10. Dave hates us. I got it for $2, that was definitely worth. I would even say it's... Maybe worth 3? I'd say definitely 10.
00:37:23
Speaker
So at full price, I think now it's still only 10 on Steam. I'd agree. I think it's worth 10. But I definitely wouldn't bend over backwards to play it. Yep. Ten dollars, not a penny more.
00:37:36
Speaker
I mean, yeah, that is $10. All right. Well, that's all the time we've got today, folks. Thank you for attending one more class of the soapstone. Is it the soapstone? No, it's just soapstone. I like how it considers the classes. Yeah. But thank you for listening. We're here to teach. And as always, this is Dave. And this is Jake. Have a good one.
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Speaker
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Speaker
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