Limbo is celebrating an important birthday in the strangest way possible. On July 17th — four days shy of its 15th anniversary — Playdead’s indie horror classic was . Inside, ไPlaydead’s 2016 follow-up, was also removed from the digital storefront.
We don’t yet know why, as Playdead hasn’t provided any reasoning for the decision. But the studio’s co-founder Dino Patti, who left after Inside shipped, has said that At time of writing, Playdead has not commented on whe꧟ther the lawsuit i💝s the cause of the games' removal, but .
Though it's unclear why that would requi🌸re removing the🔯 game entirely, instead of a simple patch.
At this point, it seems like Limbo and Inside may be the full extent of🍨 Playdead's legacy. The studio hasn’t shipped a game in the near-decade since 🍸Patti’s departure, despite teasing a sci-fi game all the way back in 2017. If this is all we end up getting, it's an impressive and impactful resume. Limbo is one of the most important games of the 2010s and one of the most seminal indie games of all time.
Xbox Live Arcade And The Games That Made It
Limbo was one of a handful of releases that carved out a space out for indie titles in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Alongside Spelunky, Braid, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Meat Boy, and Fez, Limbo was an early breakout on Xbox Live Arcade. With those pioneers, it helped prove that console players would pay for an all-digital indie game that came nowhere near 🎀the value or produ𝓀ction budget they were accustomed to experiencing on consoles.
It's easy to forget that we needed t🦩o learn what an indie game was back then. We now live in an era of clear bifurcation. There are triple-A games, there are indie games, and we have different expectations for what games from either group need to offer and how much they can cost.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Double-A games are on the rise, but that's a recent phenomenon.
Players don't expect a four-person team to put out something that looks like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Part 2, and🎶 players similarly would be upset if Naughty Dog announced that its next game was a 2D Metroidvania. I tend to feel like we should be more okay with big developers💯 making smaller stuff, but the benefit of the dividing line is that players are willing to play smaller, less expensive games so long as the delineation is clear.
Limbo helped get console pl෴ayers on board with this new paradigm. It showed that, if you took a chance and spent 15 bucks on a weird-looking game, you might get something really special in return.
I keep saying ‘⛄console players’ 🅠because the prominence of Flash games through Newgrounds meant that PC players already knew that stuff that looked cheap could still be really fun.
Limbo Expanded The Definition Of Interactive Horror
As indie games rose to prominence, the horror genre radically expanded along with it. In the decade and change before Limbo, the horror space had been dominated by a handful of triple-A franchises, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Silent Hill, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dead Space. In the 2010s, indie releases began to take horror🍰 in new directions.
First-person horror was one of the major outcroppings, emerging in the indie space with games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Outlast, which inspired bigger triple-A horror titles like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 7 and Village. This give-and-take also went in the other direction, as triple-A developer Hideo Kojima explored this format with P.T., which went on to inspi🥂re smaller games like Layers of Fear and Visage despite the game it was intended to promote – Silent Hills – tragically being cancelled.
Limbo had the same quality of influence as Amnesia or P.T., albeit on a smaller scale. Whereas Outlast could claim major triple-A games as acolytes, Limbo mostly influenced other indie games. The most important of those is, arguably, its own successor. Though Limbo is one of the most important games o🌌f its time, Inside is one of the best. With Inside, Playdead maintained the sidescrolling horror gameplay that defined Limbo, but took it into gorgeously low-detail 2.5D, and out of the wilderness and into a sprawling research facility and the quietly dystopi𓆏an city surrounding it.
Inside begins with its young boy protagonist emerg꧑ing from the wilderness, which feels like a nod to Limbo, which starred a young boy protagonist journeying through the w꧃ilderness.
The influence of Limbo radiated outward frꩲom Playdead, as team members moved on and made their own games. Patti co-founded Jumpship, the developer of ꦉSomerville, a sci-fi adventure game that shares Playdead's dark and dialogue-free ethos. Limbo and Inside designer Jeppe Carlsen went on to make Cocoon, and though the game has a different perspective, it shares Playdead's playful, unintuitively intuitive approach to puzzle design.
Unaffiliated developers followed suit. Tarsier's 2.5D horror series, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Little Nightmares, likely would not exist without Limbo clearing a path. The same goes for Phobia Games' Carrion, which stars a fleshy monster rampaging through a dark and dangerous research facility. Not to mention that Limbo showed that monochrome could still be a valid aesthetic for a commercial game, paving the way for black-and-white (or green-and-greenish white) wonders like Minit, Downwell, Gato Roboto, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Return of the Obra Dinn.
Limbo didn't emerge from a vacuum. Playdead's work is remiꦬniscent of Henry Selick and Tim Burton's stop-motion work on films like The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, The Corpse Bride, and Coraline. But no creative work is without influence, and 15 years later, Limbo has give📖n much more than it took.
Nothing Has Captured The Spirit Of Classic Silent Hill Like Indie Horror Game Detღention
The𓄧 perfect way to fill a Silent Hill-shaped hole.
