Richard's Online Journal

[14/06/08] Limbo of the Lost

UPDATE: I’ve added a few videos that other people uploaded to YouTube. They’re the best way of seeing the quality of this game without having to actually play it.

If you haven’t been following the story, Limbo of the Lost is… controversial. It’s an adventure that’s been around for a few months over here, which just got a release in the US. It would have gone without notice, if not for GamePlasma noticing that some of its scenes looked… somewhat familiar. Like it was borrowing a little more than inspiration from Oblivion. And Unreal Tournament. And Thief. And Diablo. And World of Warcraft. And Painkiller. And Spawn: The Movie. And Rune.

And so many, many others...

Ouch. I actually feel sorry for them, because nobody-but-nobody could be silly enough to do this while understanding the consequences. I can’t work out how the hell they thought they could get away with it - the closest I can get is the deeply naive ‘If I took the screenshot, it’s okay’, which isn’t even close to a justification. I don’t envy them, their publishers, or anyone in a five mile radius when this hots up.

But all that’s been done to death. I wanted to know something else - what the actual game was like. It’s available on BitTorrent, but while I don’t think there’s much of an ethical problem with downloading an Arrh-Jimlad! copy in this very special instance (especially since every dollar that goes into the publisher’s pocket is another bullet for the lawyers’ guns, and they’re already wielding Gatlings), I wanted to make absolutely sure I was playing it for real. So here it is. In the soon-to-be-torn flesh…

Consider it taking one for the team…

The obvious first question is ‘how bad is it, really?’ Oh, it’s bad. Very bad. Very baaaad game. Sadly, it’s not bad in a particularly funny way, but the far less interesting ‘epitome of the walkaroundinconfusedmisery-em-up’ variety. In Grim Fandango, the land of the dead was a beautiful, wacky, interesting world you could almost look forward to visiting. Here, like the name suggests, it’s miserable. Not even close to Heaven, nowhere near interesting enough to be Hell. Just murk and muck and forgotten lives. It’s not until Chapter III - the village of Darkmere - that anything approaching an actual game shows up, and that’s not until you’ve done hours of retreading the same handful of empty, featureless rooms until it’s a choice between walkthrough and suicide.

As well as being utterly boring, it’s very annoying. The interface is on a Ouija board, and every time you want to use something, you’ve got to sit through its short but irritating zappy-lightning bolt appearance. It works on individual objects, so if you’ve missed a pixel, you’ve got to try it again. And for some reason, sometimes it doesn’t work at all, or the cursor just vanishes. As for speaking to the dead directly, the conversations are as endless as they are empty. These people just won’t stop blathering…

Since you can’t skip dialogue, it’s especially noticeable that most of the game has exactly no plot. You’re just wandering from empty, dark, miserable location to empty, dark, miserable location, picking up random objects and chatting to oddly voiced Lost Souls about their problems, most of which are simply being in Limbo of the Lost. Sorry. Trapped in the Limbo of the Lost. Totally what I meant.

What passes for the story is so irrelevant, even the game barely bothers. There’s nothing even approaching a plot until around the fourth chapter. The intro is more confusing to non-manual readers than the opening of Gabriel Knight 3, and that really takes some doing. Instead, most of what passes for stuff you need to know is supplied on a whole second DVD… as in ‘a movie DVD’… in all its gloriously awful unglory, along with… ahem… a series of Making Of’ videos.

No comment. Too easy…

Destiny faces off against Fate in the epic battle for control of the universe.

Most of the puzzles rely on the most painful kinds of pixel hunting, not least the infuriating type where you can use the right item on, say, an urn, and get a generic ‘that doesn’t work’ response, because you were meant to do it on the ‘oil’ on the top of it instead. Early on, one important item is found in the shadows over on the scrolling left half of the screen, which you’d never normally see, because your mouse cursor goes bye-bye as soon as you click on the door to get back to the next room. Grr.

Even when you have all the pieces, many of the challenges are borderline insane. Take the puzzle where you’ve got to steal a lost soul - a glowing spirit in a green bottle. You find a suitable replacement just lying around, but it’s empty. No problem. You fill the new green bottle from a tap, only for some reason, the water shows through as a bright cerulean blue. To make it glow green, you’ve got to…

...mix it with saffron?

Really. That’s the solution. The only explanation I can think of… and I’m straining to even come close to justifying this… is that they were going for some kind of blue + yellow colour puzzle, which doesn’t make any sense given that water is clear, and saffron isn’t radioactive! Please! Tell me I missed something! Words fail me, and this is in a game where you earlier mixed a worm and a bottle of water to create tequila.

It’d be bad enough trying to unravel this nonsense on its own, but you’re constantly punished for having the temerity to stop and think. Stop handing out orders for even a few seconds and the main character will walk across the whole screen - all the way to the very front - just to rap on the screen and order you to hurry up. You can’t skip the sequence, interrupt it when it starts, turn it off, or do anything other than endure it. Constantly. Until you turn the game off and use it as a frisbee - a course of action I can heartily endorse, at least unless you’ve got a microwave nearby.

The third chapter picks up a bit when you discover the secret of Monkey Island beneath a steel sky…

Despite all this, there’s some… not exactly ‘charm’ as such, but that’s probably the closest word to describe the extreme Britishness of it all, for good and bad. On one side, obstructive, idiot characters, schoolboy level comedy, and the odd splash of insincere racism. Honestly, it’s 2008, and I’m stuck watching an Indian actually use the word ‘Paleface’ and take part in a “How” joke? On the other, it’s like the world’s darkest school play; awful, but so very, very earnest. The voice acting is frequently impossible to hear due to the really, really bad sound levels and mumbled performances from half the cast, but almost everyone involved really throws themselves into their limited roles. It’s almost sweet at times. Almost.

(The main character is the best of the lot - insanely cheery given the situation, to the point that he’ll often quip at the monsters instead of being afraid of them, or occasionally just just turn to the camera and give it a big ol’ shit-eating grin for no reason. He’s so laid back, he’ll even smile happily as he watches a guy rip his own fingernail off and hand it over as a present. A stiff upper lip, even when carting an inventory full of rotting organs round the land of the damned. Fantastic.)

All that said, most of the real entertainment comes from the game’s glorious, impossible chutzpah. I particularly love the Making Of movie where you see a blatantly Poser-created figure making the transition from wireframe to textured like it’s the Ascent of Man, rather than a one-click option in the editing window.

There’s also the irony that despite the amateurish stuff and ripped graphics, the game’s really not that lazy. It’s incredibly long. Every conversation snippet has its own rendered animation, filmed by a cameraman with a serious obsession for extreme close-ups. Every torch takes the time to flicker in the right way. The big rendered scenes - the ones the artists actually bothered to make themselves, I mean - are cheap and tacky as all literal hell, but still, a fair whack of authentic work has gone into making this damned game.

Sadly, that’s not much of a compliment - it’s still terrible, and it looks terrible and it sounds terrible. It’s the ambitious game that Del Boy and Rodney might have made, had they been into incredibly dull horror. It’s just that, ignoring the ripped backgrounds and Poser models for a moment, it’s a surprisingly ambitious project, and gets some really strange things almost right. For instance… and bear in mind, there’s a very short list to pick from here… this is probably the best attempt I’ve seen at getting a generic Poser figure into a 2D point and click world. Yes, it still looks ugly, and the model keeps clipping through itself every time it tries to do anything harder than talk, but eh. It’s Poser. It’s never your friend. Credit where it’s due and all that.

“It’s-a-not-me! Honest!”

Without the controversy, nobody would have noticed this game at all. I think I can say this with confidence, because I know most adventure games that hit the market, and I’d never heard of it until last week. Still, I’m as kinda-glad to have played it myself as I am stunned that it’s gotten a good review on adventure game dedicated sites, where people should damn well know better than to support this kind of horseshit - plagarism notwithstanding. Sadly, it’s just not bad enough for my own shelves, as a worthy contender to sit alongside the comedy apocalypse of Hopkins FBI, Lula 3D, or the other adventures on the part of my games shelf labelled ‘In Event Of Fire, Throw Games In’. It’s just boring. And rubbish. Mourn it not after it vanishes.