Indie Games

Limbo – Critical Miss #6

/ atomicbobomb / 1 Comment

Independently developed games have been around nearly as long as video games have existed, but they really came into their own through the mid 2000’s to the early 2010’s. Games like Cave Story, Braid, and Super Meat Boy all helped establish indie games as a source of excellent titles. Even Minecraft, one of the most successful and popular games ever made, was an indie game developed by the tiny studio Mojang. Indie games have been a fascination of mine ever since my reintroduction to video games around 2014. In fact, Cave Story + was one of the first games I bought on my 3DS. One indie game I always heard a massive amount of praise for was Limbo, but I only recently sat down to play through it.

Limbo was the poster child of early 2010’s indie games. Developed by Playdead with a team of around 8 people, it emphasized a striking art style and atmospheric storytelling while cutting gameplay down to its core. I came out in 2010 to instant critical acclaim and was the indie darling of that year. Being a platformer, it was a very familiar style of game, but one that was done so differently and artistically that people took notice.

Limbo is focused to a laser point. It gets rid of everything unnecessary to the game, leaving only two actions for the player to do besides moving the character: jump and interact, which means either pushing/pulling an item or hitting a button. Everything single thing and mechanic in the game revolves around these two actions. The anti-gravity affects how and where the boy will jump, a bear trap might need to be pulled into the path of a murderous spider leg or a box pushed to climb pass a high ledge, the section were the level rotates around the boy moving the layout of the platforms constantly, making the timing for jumps constantly changing. 

This strong focus is Limbo’s greatest strength because it extends out of the gameplay and into the presentation. The art style is the first thing any new player will notice about the game. Limbo’s visuals use only light, shadows, and the shades of grey found between. This style shows the character and the world around them as silhouettes from distant light and helps builds the bleak atmosphere of the game. The world the boy must travel through is utterly indifferent except when it wants him dead. It forms an oppressive loneliness around the player that sticks with them well after the game is over. Personally, the loneliness of the atmosphere is what affected me most about Limbo and what I continued swirling around in my head when thinking about the game because the Limbo seems to actively work to make the player dislike it.

The puzzle solving loop of the game relies heavily on trial and error. Nearly all the puzzles and platforming challenges in the game are close to impossible to solve on the first try, either due to very strict platforming timing or some of the pieces of a puzzle being obtuse without the player dying first. Trial and error gameplay has always been a touchy subject for games as it often seems unfair to the player, who couldn’t predict an obstacle until it’s killed them. Limbo can be frustrating with its trail and error design, especially when the player is expected to interact with a new mechanic they have no idea how it will act, but it doesn’t hurt the overall experience too much. Death, for one, is always interesting since the boy’s body will rag-doll and react to the game’s physics engine and respawning is extremely quick, meaning the player doesn’t have to wait to play the game after an unfair death. Secondarily, the trial and error design feels intentionally hostile to the player themselves and this helps with the atmosphere of dread and oppression. Ultimately I believe gameplay should come absolute first for any game, but I begrudgingly respect Limbo for sacrificing smooth gameplay to heighten atmosphere.

The first half of Limbo is the stronger one. The moment the player is sunk into the game’s world and take in the bleak landscape around them is one of the most off putting in gaming, the blurry outlines of shapes in the background looking like they’re about to jump out at the player at any second. The game feels like a horror game at first, with a giant spider trying to hunt the boy throughout much of the first half and a strange group of people trying to impede your progress forward. 

By the second half of the game, though, much of the horror for the forest is gone and replaced with more physics-based puzzles of the industrial area. The player will have to explore run-down buildings with electric signs, buzzsaws, and machine gun turrets that never truly feel like they belong to the world in which the player explores. More frustrating, though, is that the puzzles become much more strict. It’s only natural for puzzles in a puzzle game to get more challenging as the game progresses, but they would be expected to add difficulty by making the puzzles trickier or require more thought and exploration of the surrounding area. In Limbo’s case, the difficulty is increased by narrowing the margin for error. Timing to move boxes or complete a task will rely on frames of timing and platforming challenges often come down to pixels between success and missing a swinging rope needed to pass. I was nestled in for a slow, puzzle solving game and was not prepared for platforming challenges later in the game.

Even with these issues in the game, however, Limbo is still good, but I have trouble deciding whether I think it’s great or not. My opinion of the game wavers between loving the game and thinking it is fine. Moments like the spider chase and the section where the player rotates the area around them are great, but the frustration felt with some of the later, stricter puzzles means I not itching to replay Limbo anytime soon. The thing I know for sure, though, is that I respect the hell out of Limbo for it’s tight focus on core elements and it’s willingness to emphasize atmosphere over everything else. These are choices not often seen in games by AAA studios and is the reason I can easily recommend Limbo, and independent gaming in general.

Cuphead & Attack Patterns

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So I finally got a chance to play Cuphead and I’m now here to lay any arguments about its quality to rest: Cuphead is dope. The game caught my eye, like it caught so many others’, first with its art style. Hand drawn in the style of a 30’s cartoon, it was immediately unique, gorgeous and fresh. When the game came out and I saw it was a challenging boss rush with Megaman type run and gun levels, I knew I had to play. I knew the game was going to be hard, but I wasn’t expecting how bad I would be at it Eventually I overcame the game and realized that this was something special I had to write about.

Cuphead is a game about dodging and shooting. You have to make sure to aim so you hit the enemies during a fight, but you have to do this while avoiding all the attacks the enemies throw at you. This is pretty basic stuff and a description that 90% of all video games can fall under. But it is the way that Cuphead challenges the player to memorize attack patterns and move during the fights that sets it apart.

All the bosses in the game only have a handful of attacks they utilize. The attacks are clearly telegraphed due to the obviously cartoony art style with shorter attacks having smaller telegraph windows and longer, harder to dodge attacks have longer telegraphing. It takes some time to learn all the patterns and tells for attacks in any given fight, but after a couple tries the patterns should be ingrained in your muscles. The fights always remain challenging though. Some attack patterns, like the dragon’s fireballs, can have different points of contact while some bosses, like the genie, can have a vast pool of different attacks to draw from. The player themself also has to be taken into account. While you may know the patterns and their tells like the back of your hand, effectively avoiding them and still managing to land your attacks is still a challenging task.

Every boss in the game has multiple phases where they change forms and attack patterns. You might start off fighting a blimp only for it to turn into a giant mechanical moon by the last phase. This helps Cuphead remain challenging as each phase has unique attacks to avoid, but it also helps to push the player to keep playing. You want to learn a phase’s patterns of attacks to see what sort of crazy form the boss will take next. Each time you die a line appears showing you just how close you were to a new phase or how close you were to defeating it, making you want to give it just one more try.

There are a variety of attack patterns on display in Cuphead. Some bosses will shoot projectiles and others will move around the screen trying to hit you. Bosses like the bee lady, Rumor Honeybottoms, will have mini bosses for phases and others like Beppi the Clown will summon basic enemies as part of the fight. There are attacks that chase you around, projectiles that spin in a loop de loop pattern or fall from the top of screens, and constant bullet spirals more commonly found in bullet hell games. Some bosses will even limit where you stand during the fight, be it from having moving platforms or by taking away the ground you stand on with thorns or spikes.

The best example of all these mechanics working together has to be the pirate boss, Captain Brineybeard. He is a pirate standing on top of his ship, meaning he has a smaller hitbox than most the other bosses because it is tucked away in the upper left corner. To hit him, you’ll either need to jump or stand still to aim diagonally, making it tougher to avoid any incoming attacks. Luckily, the first phase is pretty easy with only two attacks to worry about: a barrel that will move left or right across the screen and drop to the ground if you go under it and projectiles from an octopus that the Captain will shoot at you. If you stay on the move and hit the boss when you have a safe opening, this phase won’t take long.

Phase two, however, gets trickier by limiting the players ability to avoid attacks and giving them shorter safe windows to aim and shoot. Along with the attacks from phase one, Captain Brineybeard will now summon other enemies by whistling. There is a shark that will come from the left side of the screen and take up most of the space the player has to maneuver in, a squid that will pop out in the middle background and splash ink to darken the visibility of the screen unless the player kills it quick enough, and a dogfish that will jump out of the water on the right side and slide across the ground in a set number and distance. These force the player to play within momentary limitations; be it smaller space to stand in, harder to see attacks, or just by making them decide whether it is better to jump at possible inopportune times or focus on hitting the enemies instead of the boss.

Phase three is just phase one and two but with the Captain’s ship now joining the fight by spitting cannonballs across the ground, telegraphed by an obvious chewing animation. However, phase four changes everything by having the ship throw the Captain overboard. Now the ship’s mouth is the hitbox and all that remains of the familiar patterns of phases one through three is the barrel still moving and dropping when you are under it. The boss has two new attacks you must learn. The first being fireballs it’ll spit in a devilish loop de loop pattern that I never really got a perfect grasp on. And second is a giant pink laser that you’ll either need to duck under, which means you won’t be able to move safely if the barrel moves above you, or continuously parry the laser, a far more tricky task, but one that grants more movement options.

This boss is challenging, but when I finished the game, it was my clear favorite. It’s so finely crafted to keep the player constantly on the move while the attack patterns work so well at stacking on top of each other. This limits the player in interesting ways and gives them a lot to focus on and juggle during the fight. All the bosses in Cuphead are frantic and fast-paced, but Captain Brineybeard’s fight seems the most kinetic. I lost a lot during the fight but i was never frustrated at the game. I was only ever frustrated with myself. I knew all the patterns and how to avoid them, but executing that knowledge was the tricky part. This boss works well as an example of the entirely of Cuphead itself. It’s frantic and challenging, but completely fair. The attacks all have patterns and tells, but it’s up to the player to read and avoid them.

Celeste & Theming

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When I finished Celeste, I had over 3000 deaths. The game is difficult but I was hardly ever frustrated. There is a great sense of triumph running throughout Celeste. Whether it is completing a level, grabbing another strawberry, or just making a tricky jump to advance to the next screen, it always feel rewarding overcoming a challenge.

As somebody that lives with depression, there has always been something comforting playing a very hard game. It’s the fact that a game that takes 100% of my focus and attention is the best way for me to get immersed. This mentality is present in the narrative of Celeste as Madeline wants to do the impossible task of climbing a mountain as means of coping with her anxiety. She doesn’t know exactly why she feels compelled to climb the mountain, she only claims she wants to take her mind off things. All throughout, Celeste is a mastercraft of theming through gameplay.

The theme of a story is the human experience that the story is exploring underneath the surface. To use Shakespeare as an example, Romeo & Juliet’s theme is love while Hamlet’s is revenge. Celeste’s theme is aniexty. Video games are interesting as a storytelling median due to their interactivity, which means things like gameplay mechanics can heighten or hinder the themes of the story. Badeline is an interesting example of this mixture this of gameplay and theming.

As a character, Badeline acts as a foil to Madeline. It’s rather on the nose, but she represents Madeline’s anxiety and all the negative emotions that come with it: paranoia, anger, insecurity. Whenever Badeline appears, she actively works to make things difficult for Madeline. She’s the first level-end challenge, trying to chase Madeline down to stop her on her journey. She even causes all of the panic attacks Madeline suffers from in the game, most notably on the trolley with Theo. She wants to stop Madeline climbing the mountain by making Madeline second guess herself and by throwing any hurdle she can in Madeline’s way, an obvious representation of anxiety and the difficulties it can cause in everyday life.

The crowning jewel of the game, both in gameplay and theming, is the final level. While a little overly long, this is where Madeline and Badeline work out their differences and rejoin to work together. In gameplay, this is shown as an additional air dash Madeline can now perform. This is the best reward to the player for overcoming the challenges they have surmounted to that point. The additional dash opens up the level design so much.  

In the last level, Madeline has to climb to the top of the mountain after falling to the bottom. It is the most challenging but also the most fun level in the game. With the additional dash, the puzzles become more complex and clever. They require more precision of action and a better understanding of the game’s mechanics and that’s what make them feel the most rewarding to complete.

The cutscenes in Celeste typically play out as conversations between characters at the beginning or end of the levels. But even with this separation between story progression and gameplay throughout the game, I was completely immersed in the story of Celeste because the themes of the story run throughout the mechanics and levels. Madeline’s struggles were also mine, but her triumphs and revelations were also felt by me.