Tuesday, March 8, 2011

A Philosophical Discussion of Limbo.



Limbo is a video game that uses physics and environmental puzzles as obstacles for a small boy stuck in the otherworldly world of Limbo. Limbo of course being the fictitious edge of hell as coined from the wonder mind of Dante Alighieri. This game portrays this world through pure imagery and wonderfully familiar yet disturbingly distant imagery to the extent it seems the hell dimension and our own dimension are mixing space in the crossroads known as limbo.

*MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS*

First of all I've heard the boy searching for his baby sister story before...i don't how they came to that conclusion unless the developers wrote it online somewhere. the fact of the matter is the game tells nothing from where the boy came from or who he is. There is no back story whatsoever so here I'm going to go into my interpretation from pure imagery. Limbo uses pure imagery and a title to portray this games story. I feel it was left open ended for our own interpretations instead of a set story like most games of this day do. All we have is the title "Limbo" and the games black and white hi contrast dreary dreamlike imagery. First we have a nameless protagonist little boy who  awakens in a forest, thats it. after a few trials with bear traps and a giant spider he finds other children that well are trying to kill him or running away from him. Since everyone he encounters except for the giant spider are also children, this makes me think they are not children at all that maybe when these people died their lost souls are portrayed in their purest form, as children. but of course some are still hostile and some are just afraid. Maybe the hostile one have been there for a while and are just plain evil souls. and the ones who run and the countless dead bodies are the ones who are kind like you but think you are one of the hostiles. But the dead bodies...if you are already dead how can they die again...well maybe limbo is like a half dead maybe there is hope of coming back. or maybe the dead ones suffer a fate in hell.

Our Character is a nameless boy who just awakens in limbo. in the fashion that he runs and casually looks around it does seem that he is looking for something or someone or just plain trying to find a way out of the dangerous forest. After a while the forest starts to blend into rooftops and hotel signs and just plain industry. in a mindbogglingly heartwarming scene he finds a small girl picking flowers he looks as if he knows her and just before he gets to her a deadly parasite attaches itself to his head and heads him to certain death. He outsmarts the parasite and makes his way back to the girl but it seems where she was just picking flowers i just more lonely dead industry like everything else around him. The world seems to be unstable its shifting. I'm going to take a break to breathe here, the girl I feel is someone close to him who has also died. I think they are a couple and old couple. Maybe the wife died and the husband died there after and she had gotten a head start. maybe she was lucky and made it through all the deadly environment of limbo...maybe she isn't even there and the world is just fucking with his head and trying to get him to follow his heart to certain death. But later after some seriously mindfucking environmental obstacles he finally finds her he walks up behind her and she notices him with a gasp. end credits.

She was there after all. I do think they both died and not to far apart from one another. they could have been a young couple but they seems to have age to me...just a hunch i guess. Again in this limbo everyone is a child no matter their age. there is no time so there is no age. Just like in Lost's sideways world...everyone is there no matter when they died because there is no now... per say. I do still think they died maybe a couple of years apart since the girl got such a head start on the boy. Maybe he can get her out of limbo...maybe it was trials of reincarnation and now they can come back as babies and live together again and find each other once more. They beat it...they beat hell, they beat limbo.

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