Limbo: what does it all mean? From the moment we saw the first black and white screenshots, we knew Limbo was going to be something unique. But we didn’t know it would turn out to be this year’s Braid, an independently developed, refreshingly clever take on the puzzle platformer genre that manages to spur conversation by including just enough uncertainty in the plot. The developers at Play.
Dead Studios have gone on record saying there is no official meaning to Limbo or its ending, making it ripe for personal speculation. The only sanctioned story is “Unsure of his sister’s fate, a boy enters the unknown.” Here’s our take on the game’s many puzzles, environments, deaths and ultimate end – when we’re through, please share your thoughts in the comments! Above: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS SO SHADDUPLooking back, it seems clear to me that Limbo is a musing on the pain and confusion of adolescence, as well as the need to hold onto the innocence of one's childhood while making the transition to adulthood. The key to it all is the nature of The Boy's quest and the procession of environments, dangers and enemies he encounters along the way. He begins in an ethereal woodland environment, fairytale- like in its trappings, despite all of the horrors on show.
- Eritrea: UN Sanctions In Limbo. the brain behind the marketing and who first wrote the. it is obvious their talking about their empty and meaning less.
- . which comes from the Latin word meaning “border” or “edge,” was considered by. in limbo. The Catholic Church’s. The people behind.
This section represents childhood, an idea confirmed by the fact that the greatest adversary it holds is a huge, shadowy spider- like creature. A childhood fear for a childhood world. The next distinct environment occurs when The Boy moves underground and begins to encounter Limbo's more sentient inhabitants, the humanoid, weapon- using Lost Boy- style characters. This section, to me, carried a major Lord of the Flies feel, evoking the idea that this was The Boy's journey to high school. Away from the safety of his childhood, he encounters an aggressive wider peer group and established hierarchy, and has to survive by his wits and evasive skills against their organized, group- led violence. Following this is his first experience of the wider adult world at large, typified by the broken down hotel.
Suddenly the world of grown- ups isn't the perfect place he believed it was. It's a sinister, dirty, sleazy place, and the grotty hotel, with its sordid sexual connotations, is central to this whole metaphor. And finally he reaches the roaring, screeching industrial area. This, with its grinding machinery, repetitive automated routines and treadmill conveyor belts, represents fear of being trapped into the perceived mundanity of adult working life. And central to all of this is The Boy's search for his sister.
If you've had a sibling of a similar age, you'll know that that relationship forms the core of your whole childhood experience. They are your closest relationship, your closest peer and your playmate, your interaction with them forming everything of who you will evolve into as a child. They're the closest to you anyone will ever be, both in terms of shared experiences and genetics.
The loss of his sister thus encapsulates all of The Boy's fears of losing himself, and he must find her in order to maintain his identity and remain a whole person during his oppressive trails on the way to adulthood. Limbo, the word in the title, does not refer only to the physical world the game takes place in.
It refers to the metaphorical state that the boy's development takes him through. He is growing past being a child and is not yet a man, and he must hold onto his sister, and therefore himself, as he navigates his way through this dangerous state of flux. I tend not to delve too deeply into the meaning of a game – is Red Dead Redemption a dusty, desolate meditation on the futility of the human condition?
Johnson-Melloh Solutions has become a leading innovative Indiana Energy Service Company (ESCO) focusing on renewable and alternative energy. . especially the 'in limbo' entries. was that the meaning behind the song Hotel California was exactly what became of. Taking care of business is his game.
Plus earn 2% of your purchase value back in Reward Points with a GAME Reward account. Jump to site search; Jump to main content. meaning you don't need to worry. Limbo: what does it all mean? The developers at PlayDead Studios have gone on record saying there is no official meaning to Limbo or its. the game of limbo.
No, it’s an amazing cowboy game in which I can get drunk, have gunfights and be mauled by a cougar. Perhaps this face- value attitude is why I feel Limbo is actually being totally straightforward and open about what’s going on. It’s right there in the title…He’s dead. They both are. The girl died earlier. So what we’re experiencing is the journey of the boy, moments after his Earthly demise, questing through the murky in- between of Limbo (not the dance with a stick, but the spiritual place) to be rejoined with his sister in the afterlife.
The theology of it can get a bit heavy, but here’s the basic gist: People who die and who are neither corrupt enough for Hell nor saved enough for Heaven go to Limbo. He’s overcoming obstacles as a way of undergoing spiritual cleansing, and when the time comes, he and his sister – who, by the way, is knelt in prayer the first time we see her – will enter Heaven together.
Morbid? Yes. Complicated? Not really. Maybe it’s because I’ve played too many games and seen too many movies with giant, revelatory plot twists, but I got a strong sense of foreboding about Limbo the second the other kids started showing up. Why did they set all these traps?
Why were they so aggressively trying to kill me, and then fleeing whenever I’d get close? I wasn’t the giant, hunting spider, after all, and if anything their actions seemed to leave them defenseless against said arachnid. Either it’s all just a big misunderstanding, or – and I see this as more likely – they have excellent reason to be afraid of you.
No, the protagonist of Limbo doesn’t seem very threatening. It’s not as if he has any guns or abilities beyond jumping and pulling on things. But how much do you know about him, really? He’s pretty resourceful when it comes to manipulating the world around him. He kills a creature by ripping its last leg off and rolling its carcass onto spikes. And he seems to have no compunction about killing kids later in the game by leading them through deadly hydraulic presses. And he dies, over and over again, only to resume his relentless push forward seconds later.
Above: Quit chasin’ me, y’dumb brat! Like it or not, there’s a lot to suggest that you’re the villain in Limbo, and that your quest to find the boy’s missing sister might not be as innocent as it seems. The ending itself is what seals it. After crashing into a wooded glen that looks an awful lot like the one in which you start the game, you finally find the boy’s sister. She isn’t in a posture that suggests distress; she’s crouching on the ground, possibly playing, possibly picking something, possibly digging. As the boy approaches – in a very slow, ominous way – she stiffens and doesn’t look behind her. Cut to credits, and Limbo’s title screen… which happens to look almost exactly like the area where you found the boy’s sister.
The differences? A lot of time has apparently passed, as the rope ladder has mostly rotted away and the vegetation’s gotten a little more unkempt. There’s also a suspiciously well- defined lump on the ground that corresponds to the area right in front of where the boy was standing. And we can hear flies – a lot of flies – buzzing, suggesting there’s something disgusting nearby. Given the game’s macabre tone, this leaves two possibilities.
The first is that the boy killed his sister and left her to rot in the woods. The other kids, the ones who set the traps? They were her defenders.
The entire thing was a gauntlet designed to keep the boy from killing his sibling, and you were the villain all along. The second (and more fitting) possibility is that she killed him.
Maybe he tried to kill her first. Maybe she’d been trying to kill him all along. The motives and specifics don’t really matter; all that matters is that he’s dead, doomed to rise again and repeat the actions that led to his demise, like a ghost. Or a soul trapped in limbo.
Limbo” – Exclusive Interview with Martin Stig Andersen. It takes a strong game to weave so seamlessly the combination of art contained within. Limbo was a game that so totally embodied itself that it found its way atop most “Best of…” lists the year of it’s release on XBLA. With the game properly ported and recently released on PC and PSN, Designing. Sound. org took some time to catch up with Martin Stig Andersen. When I saw Martin speak this spring at GDC I was struck by how well formed his concept of sound for Limbo was, not only that but how his formative years seemed completely in support of hit contributions to the soundscape. If you have played through even a section of the game you will know that this could be no small feat, as it’s not every sound designer that could inexorably link the flickering black and white images to abstract impressions of sound.
This is a story that follows a complete trajectory. From his days in University learning and experimenting with electroacoustic music, acousmatic music and soundscapes throughout the development and application of interactive audio gestures which help bring to life the action on screen. Read on for further insight…DK: How did your education prepare you for interactive media? MSA: My compositional studies at conservatory and university were very much biased towards the artistic side. At City University in London where I studied electroacoustic composition the general agenda was to discuss “whys” rather than “hows”, for example why a specific sound or sound structure evokes certain associations rather than how it was created. So, as far as technology is concerned I’m pretty much self- taught.
On the aesthetic side, at university we dealt with all kinds of electroacoustic music, including interactive music, combining live performance (voice or instrument) and electronics. However unlike games in which interaction happens directly between the player and the game, in interactive concert music the interaction is something happening between the performer(s) on stage and an interactive playback system.
In such situation the listener may not at all grasp the interactivity of a composition, which of course posed a lot of questions, like whether or not it’s important for the audience to actually experience such interactivity. Personally I’ve never composed a piece that I wanted to be perceived as interactive per se. Even with Limbo which is natively interactive qua being a video- game, I’d say I did my best to avoid drawing the players’ awareness towards the idea of interactivity. This is because the game isn’t really interactive beyond a basic moment- to- moment level where the player maneuvers the protagonist and interacts with the physics of the environment, while on the larger scale the game remains a fixed, linear experience. In regards to interactive media I guess the most important skill I took with me from university is what you could call temporal awareness.
By studying the perception of form and structure in music and audiovisuals I acquired an understanding of the various temporalities inhabiting not only sound but also visuals, and learned how to match and contrast such temporalities creatively in order to make sound contribute to the overall flow or even structure of an audiovisual experience. Working with Limbo I identified various temporalities inhabiting different types of gameplay, and was able to respond to those while at the same time building larger scale sound structures encompassing several gameplay moments each featuring different temporalities. I even consider there to be a tangible global sound structure contributing to the wholeness of Limbo, although a few people have actually commented on that.
Studying acousmatic music and soundscape composition in general have also served as an important inspiration in my audiovisual and interactive work, although the concepts associated with these genres are not directly applicable to audiovisual media. DK: When did you first become aware of Acousmatic principles and Soundscapes and their creation? MSA: I can’t remember exactly when but sometime during my studies at conservatory in Denmark. Yet in Denmark, at least back then, there were a lot of misconceptions regarding those terms, and it wasn’t before joining City University in London in 2. I came to understand the essence of the ideas. Getting acquainted to the aesthetic foundation of acousmatic composition was undoubtedly the biggest revelation in my musical carrier, and I somewhat felt like being ported 2.
It’s hard to think about the time before that, and I wish I’d discovered the ideas earlier on, or that I’d have had the imagination to come up with them myself! I remember when playing the piano in my childhood I had this abstract inner vision of pulling the keys on the keyboard apart, and entering the sound, like I wanted to be inside sound itself. Today I haven’t been using a keyboard for over ten years, and I’ve learned to form sound as if it was a piece of clay.
Prior to joining City University I’d already learned many of the tools that are often associated with electroacoustic composition, such as Max. MSP and Audio. Sculpt, and I also did compose stuff that was acousmatic in nature, I just didn’t have the bigger perspective at that time.
DK: What were some of the inspirations taken from these idea’s that you applied? MSA: What I found interesting in relation to audiovisual media was that soundscape and acousmatic music together embraces the entire continuum between representational and abstract sound, in this way dismissing the traditional dividing line between sound design and music. By deploying such approaches in audiovisual work you can make seamless transitions between realism and abstraction, and make sound travel smoothly between the diegetic and non- diegetic space of a represented world.
For me it has a much bigger psychological impact when you turn a naturalistic soundscape into abstraction by making your sound effects play as “music” rather than adding some traditional background music. Moreover, making your “music” emerge from the environment is likely to make the audience more forgiving towards it since they’ll accept it as stemming, however abstractly, from the environment. This feature attains special relevance in video games where the player may get stuck from time to time and the audio elements need to be flexible in terms of duration. It’s important to note that although acousmatic composition does have certain potentials in relation to audiovisual work it doesn’t really make sense to use the term “acousmatic” in this context. Not at least because in the context of film the term has merely come to denote diegetic sounds that are off screen.
DK: Had you worked with interactive audio prior to games? MSA: I did a few projects utilizing interactive audio, including electroacoustic theater performances where I created sound systems that reacted to noises made by the actors on stage, and pieces mixing instruments and interactive audio. Yet I haven’t been creating much that the listener could interact with directly. I think this comes down to the point that what I like to do with interactive media isn’t interactive per se but still more of a structured experience, and so, allowing the listeners to interact directly with a composition would probably give them the impression that the music is supposed to be interactive, and that they should be able to influence the course of the music itself. Video games, at least accounting those that are rule- based, are great in that the player doesn’t expect them to be interactive per se but contrarily accepts there to be an authored, linear path through them. Game design can communicate clearly to the player what to expect in terms of interactivity, and stay true to that.
I found that more difficult outside the field of games where the lack of rules and conventions often cause the audience to be preoccupied with figuring out and interpreting the interactive system rather than engaging themselves in the experience. DK: Was Limbo your first commercial game? MSA: Yes, Limbo was my first game, although I consider it more as an artistic venture. DK: While the outcome has a well defined audio aesthetic, how clear was the direction you were given for creating the soundscape for the game?
MSA: I’ve been lucky to work with a game director who’s as sensitive to sound as any other aspect of a game. Before I joined the production, which was rather late, the game director Arnt Jensen had already been thinking a lot about sound. For example, he wanted to give prominence to the boy’s Foley sounds, to emphasize silence and subtlety in the ambiences, and to avoid music that would manipulate the emotions of the player. On a more general level he wanted the sound to suggest a distanced, enveloped, and secret world.
Those ideas corresponded very much to my own from watching the original concept trailer, and eventually Jensen entrusted me the task of developing the entire sound- world for the game. Based on mutual trust I think we managed to form a criteria of success where both of us were fully content with the sound. DK: How important do you feel the sound processing involved with creating a sound is in regards to it’s final outcome? MSA: Sound processing was essential in defining the sound of Limbo. Inspired by the bleak and grainy b/w imagery I ventured into using obsolete analogue equipment, and by running all sounds through old wire- recorders and tape- recorders they came to echo a distant past. Even sounds that were originally heavily processed using contemporary digital techniques such as time stretch and phase vocoding acquired this quality, as the analogue transformation helped to eliminate the digital byproducts of such processes. Using analogue equipment also enhanced the dynamic contrast between the sounds since louder sounds would naturally get more distorted than softer ones.