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Limbo is one of the best games in recent memory. The second you finish the review, go onto Xbox Live and support it. Dont play Call of Duty a little more. Dont buy some shit new clothes for your avatar. Buy this game!

Developed by Danish company PlayDead, Limbo looks like Little Big Planet if it got redesigned by Edward Gorey and the Bolexbrothers. It’s a stark, frightening, black-and-white world of nightmarish creatures and desolate environments. A world that feels lonely, but eerily menacing. The only thing that even comes close is the town in the Silent Hill games, that relentless feeling that something intangible wants you dead.

There’s little story to speak of, with the only hint being a single line on the XBL product description: “A boy journeys into Limbo searching for his lost sister”. That’s all you really need. Like an arthouse film with all the impact and none of the wank, Limbo is all about mood and tone. Your journey will take place over a selection of environments, from a dusty forrest, to dilapidated city rooftops, to spooky industrial areas.

Despite it’s 2D platform style, Limbo is as unsettling and atmospheric as any horror game. There is a relentless sense of dread as you navigate this cruel world; each beacon of hope you come across usually leading to a grisly discovery. For example, early on in the forrest section I saw the first sign of another human being. I raced over to them but suddenly the earth fell from beneath us, dropping me into a hole and revealing that he was dangling from a noose. It was a simple but powerful visual, and one that sent a tingle down my spine.

Indeed, the very rare times you encounter another person in Limbo, it is nearly always twisted. A group of faceless men try to kill you at one early point, always running just off-screen and out of shot as you try to get a clear look at them. Another section requires you to use the corpses of dead children to cross a lake. Platformer it may be, but Limbo is certainly not for kids. The little boy you control will be dismembered, stabbed, shot, crushed and electrocuted several times over the course of the game – and seeing the the whites of his eyes, the only feature on his silhouetted body, go out is a little bit fucked up no matter how many times you see it.

You’ll die in Limbo. A lot. The gameplay is geared towards trial and error á la Abe’s Odyssey and Flashback. A clever checkpoint system stops the game from being frustrating, and you’ll only ever be a few feet away from where you perished. For a black and white game, and even more impressively for a platformer, death in Limbo is swift, nasty and incredibly violent. It’s here where the pitch black humour shines, as when your boy dies you will nearly always have a nervous laugh to yourself. It’s not because it’s funny though – It’s a defense mechanism. Like all the best horror movies – it’s the stuff you dont see that really fucks with your head.

Forgetting the astounding art design, the gameplay still holds up as incredibly clever and addicting. Many times you’ll try to solve puzzles fruitlessly, because you’re trying to second guess the way the game works. The best way to solve most the sections is to simply forget what you know and expect from traditional platformers. It’s here that Limbo shines – eclipsing even the cleverest elements of the excellent Little Big Planet. It can create a more satisfying and intricate puzzle with little more than ropes and boxes than LBP could create with all the visual bells and whistles in the world. One section had me scratching my head for a while, until I started idly playing around with the environment, and it’s here that I discovered the solution to the puzzle. Other sections require you to really think about the mechanics, never let you slip into auto pilot.

The beauty of the gameplay is in its simplicity and refinement. There are two buttons: jump and action. Far from limiting the scope of the gameplay, the world, and how you interact with it, is where you’ll see the diversity here – and there’s a real sense of weight and impact with everything that happens thanks to the robust physics. The designers squeezed every possible action and event they could out of the boys small moveset, and the results are eye opening. You’ll still have to time the odd perfect jump, but there’s a hell of a lot more to it than that, and discovering what you can do at different points is always a joy, with the game letting you experiment and find out yourself.

The game looks jaw-dropping in places, and consistently impresses with its unique visual style. It’s hard to believe that the game is a meagre 120MB when it looks and sounds this good. It’s great to see a game where the art style didn’t limit or define the gameplay and vice-versa, as the black and white haze of visuals has been woven into the gameplay and narrative.

Sound design in Limbo earns big points. There’s no “music” to speak of. What you do get is a series of industrial noises and, even more infrequently, the odd gentle part (similar to Aphex Twin’s more laid back stuff) to highlight certain actions and events. Quite often the puzzles use sound to clue you in to what is happening, sucking you in. There’s a reason this game is so much better at getting into your head than others – it’s because it literally demands that you sit forward and pay attention.

This may seem like a review full of superlatives, but the more I think about Limbo the more I cant actually see anything wrong with it. If I have one complaint it’s about the short length, lasting as it does at between 3 to 4 hours to complete on the first playthrough. Every minute of that time, though, you will enjoy. There are no game lengthening tricks pulled, no impossible sections, and no backtracking. What is here is streamlined gaming bliss, lovingly created right down to each step your fragile little protagonist takes, building up to a beautiful and dark ending.

€14.40 may seem like a lot to pay for a game that only lasts a couple of hours, but Limbo delivers on all fronts. It’s already a forerunner for my Game of The Year, and I cant imagine anyone playing this and not liking it.

Heaven: One of the most original and beautiful looking games ever made. Outstanding sound design. Fundamentally terrific gameplay. Powerful psychological horror. Superb pacing.

Purgatory: Nothing really. Short length may annoy some, but the content that’s here is streamlined and polished to a mirror shine. If they had tried to fill it out it would have ruined it.

Hell: Not a thing. Seriously. Buy the fuck out of this game.

Limbo is available for purchase on Xbox Live for 1200 Microsoft Points (€14.40 approx). If there are less than 200 Microsoft Points in your account €18 worth (3 x €6 500 point bundles) must be purchased to access the content.