Preview and Interview: IGF Award Winner LIMBO - Preview

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Back at GDC we got hands on time with a lot of games from big publishers and well-known developers, but some of our most enjoyable experiences were with some of the award winning Indie games. LIMBO was one such game. LIMBO was the winner of two IGF awards, one for Technical Excellence and one for Excellence in Visual Art. The producer, Mads Wibroe, spoke with us about his unique and interesting game.

LIMBO threw me into a desolate, and oddly gorgeous world. The color pallet is completely black and white, but with some incredible lighting and environment detail the world of LIMBO is never dull. The goal is simple; to solve puzzles and advance through the world as you (a boy who appears as little more than a shadow with white eyes) try to find your missing sister.

LIMBO uses simple actions for complex puzzles. Finding the way to stop a spider from killing you or avoiding a pit may require creative use of your environment, generally through dragging items and clever platforming. As you advance you’ll probably die, multiple times, in incredibly shocking and brutal manners, which makes the experience all the more memorable. Indeed, if the section I played was any indication, LIMBO may rival the likes of Braid in artistic achievement.  Read the full interview below.

Interview:

VGC: Could you describe LIMBO for those who haven’t heard of it? 

Mads: LIMBO is an adventure puzzle-platformer. It starts out on the adventurous side and develops gradually into a very challenging puzzle-platform game. Especially the puzzle element is going to be demanding on the player. The tagline of the game title is "uncertain of his sisters fate, a boy enters LIMBO". As so much else in the game, this is ambiguous and leaves much to the imagination of the player. We hope you will find LIMBO to be beautiful and disturbing - not an epic narrative.

VGC: Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and PlayDead? 

Mads: Playdead is founded by Arnt Jensen and Dino Patti. We've grown the company organically around the development of LIMBO. It pretty much started with Arnt releasing a concept video in 2006 which received a fair bit of attention. Since then we incrementally secured funding and brought in the right people. While it's taken a long time for us to complete, the game now lives up to our expectations and we're extremely proud of it. 

VGC: How did you come up with the idea for the game, and how long have you been working on it? 

Mads: Arnt made the first concept drawings six years ago and for the first few years he worked with Morten Bramsen, to refine the visual expression. Morten later developed into a regular one man army and is single-handedly responsible for practically all art in the final game.

VGC: Are there any games in particular that you would say offered inspiration for it?

Mads: Another World aka Out of this World. The great platform games developed by Nintendo. The beauty and emotional qualities of Fumito Ueda's works.

VGC: LIMBO was so gorgeous, and the puzzles were really interesting, it was almost as much fun watching other people play it, and trying to help them solve the puzzles, as it was playing it myself. Did you design it this way intentionally?

Mads: The game is designed specifically for solitary play. And while it may be pretty to look at over-the-shoulder, it's lacking almost all the intensity. But LIMBO really does shine when several core gamers join forces and fight over the controller!

VGC: You were one of only two games in the competition to win more than one award, but aside from your own game, which of the finalists was your favorite and why?

Mads: Monaco is very deserving of the Grand Prize and Shank is gorgeous. Both Shank and Joe Danger are clearly games with significant commercial potential and will no doubt do well on the consoles. A lot of the finalists have the potential to develop into fantastic games if adequate resource is devoted.

VGC: About how long do you expect the game to be, once completed?

Mads: Our playtests indicate indicate an average of 4-5 hours. The game length depends completely on how clever you are, and we obviously reward the dull

VGC: When will LIMBO be available, on what platforms, and how much will it cost?

Mads: LIMBO will come out on the Xbox LIVE Arcade this Summer - do head over to limbogame.org and sign up for the newsletter so we can let you know when we have a proper release date. We consider LIMBO to be premium XBLA content, but the price is not set. At this point we're concentrating stone hard on the Xbox release and we're not actively working towards other targets.

VGC: What’s in the future for PlayDead? Do you have any ideas on what your next game might be, and what genres you may want to experiment with in the future?

Mads: We're not ready to hint at the direction the next game is taking, but we're hoping it will take us less than six years to develop.

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