Limbo Message Board

140 won the Excellence in Audio award at IGF 2013. It was created by Jeppe Carlsen in his spare time, because Carlsen works for Playdead during the day, where he was the lead designer on morbid, monochrome platformer Limbo. 140 is another sidescrolling platformer, but it’s the antithesis of that game. Let me tell you Wot I Think.(more…)

Playdead's critically acclaimed black-and-white platformer Limbo is now available on iOS for $4.99. It plays absolutely beautifully on an iPad.

If you're arachnophobic, you may take issue with having a giant spider on your phone. Limbo, Playdead's breakout video game with legs, is now available in the App store for $5 for iPad and iPhone. "Dark, disturbing, yet eerily beautiful, Limbo is a world that deserves to be explored," our own Richard Mitchell concluded in his review of the original Xbox Live Arcade release back in 2010.

Another indie hit, Monaco, is on Mac today through Steam for $15. If you already own Monaco on Windows you can get the Mac version right away through Steamplay. The cooperative heist game also comes with a level editor with Steam Workshop support.

As sad and miserable as the world of Limbo may be, it seems like players just can't get enough of it. Developer Playdead has announced that the monochromatic platformer will arrive on iOS starting July 3 for $4.99. The app will be compatible with devices including and above the iPhone 4S, iPad 2 and the latest iPod Touch.

Playdead has also revealed that Limbo has sold over 3 million copies across PS3, Xbox 360, PC, Mac and Vita. That's a lot of giant, terrifying spiders.

As we approach the third anniversary of LIMBO, the game is finally ready for handheld devices. Together, with the talented people at Double Eleven, we at Playdead have been working hard to adapt LIMBO to PS Vita without compromising the experience.

We are proud to reveal that the game will be out on PSN for PS Vita next Tuesday, June 5th, for $14.99.

…Happy dying.

Regards,
Playdead

#140 Ingenious puzzles and a chilling black-and-white aesthetic helped make 2011's Limbo a critically acclaimed hit. Now, the guy who crafted much of that indie success' gameplay has something new coming out, a stripped-down platformer called 140 that's exploding with rainbow hues. More »

#limbo It's not a full, real game yet, but Newgrounds user executive11 is working on it. For now, you can bounce around in the pretty half-Limbo, half-Mario world. More »

#screengrab This might be the saddest combination of characters/worlds ever. Thanks, z0h3, for making me go "aww" and then promptly "aww." They were two totally different "aww"s, I swear. More »

Here's the latest trailer from Ninja Theory's Devil May Cry reboot, hot off of the presses from Famitsu's YouTube channel. You can see a few of Dante's new navigation tricks around the confusing world of Limbo, as well as a boss battle against a creature known as Succubus. Ugly!

#limbo I usually don't like listening to outside music while I play games, and certainly not while I play atmospheric games like Limbo. And yet if I had to choose a soundtrack for Playdead's dark little game, I could think of worse albums than Radiohead's Amnesiac. More »

Limbo, like many digital games this generation, started on XBLA and moved elsewhere.

Limbo developer Playdead has confirmed reports from earlier this week that Limbo could have debuted on PlayStation Network.

Eerie platformer Limbo was released on Xbox Live Arcade first, but eventually came to PSN (a year later!), PC, Mac, and even Linux.

At the Develop Conference, Sony Computer Entertainment executive producer Pete Smith said if Sony had given up its demands to control Limbo, it may have premiered on PSN.

“There are obvious benefits to keeping it, but also to giving it up: you're way more likely to get the deal," said Smith. "Remember: 100 per cent of nothing is nothing. A publisher is much more likely to commit to marketing and merchandising if they own the IP [intellectual property]. [...] Sometimes all we want is protection so [devs] don't make a game, finish it then go to one of our rivals. We look at IP on a case by case basis. With a bit of common sense, you can find common ground."

Clearly, common ground did not include giving up ownership of Limbo and its potential future. In addition to confirming the reports were accurate, the studio gave me a brief comment on its argument.

“As a development studio, the IP is the greatest value you have,” said Playdead CEO Dino Patti in a statement. “Especially creative IPs, they should always stay with their creators.”

When the story started spreading, Patti found support from creatives like Double Fine’s Tim Schafer.

“Developers who give up their IP thinking they'll get more support from their publishers are in for a frustrating lesson,” said Schafer on Twitter. “Every developer currently negotiating a pub deal: demand your IP rights! If only 1% win, it's still easier for the next developer! I never said publishers are evil. They can be great partners. But it's better for both parties if devs own IP. Better games!”

Playdead is actively at work at its next game, which will apparently be "more crazy than Limbo."

#limbo I liked Limbo a lot. I love Bill Watteron's timeless comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. And so I would do things, ungodly things, for this T-shirt from Nowhere Bad, which combines the two things in a manner so fantastic that I can't believe no one's done it before. More »

Welcome to RPS’ first (and probably only) edition of Box News, an attempt at providing fair and balanced coverage of that most marginalized of objects in this digital age – the box – on the first day to conveniently feature more than one box-based news item in 437 years. On today’s show, we’ll be bringing you up-to-the-minute analysis of the developing Portal Lego set situation and having Limbo’s lavish new Special Edition box set live in the studio. So then, let’s dive right in.

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#limbo Limbo was one of my favorite games of 2010—a game that combined atmospherics, smart puzzle design and a wicked sense of humor into something dark, harrowing and distinctive. More »

While it might be strange to associate Limbo with "goodies," the new special edition is chock-full of them. The boxed Limbo Special Edition includes PC and Mac versions of Limbo (sans DRM), the soundtrack, art cards, a nifty sticker of Limbo's boy, "awesome 3D glasses" and a Steam key for the game. If the inclusion of 3D glasses hasn't tipped you off, the special edition of Limbo also features a new anaglyph 3D mode.

The Limbo Special Edition is available right now for $25 on Amazon. If you like Limbo as much as we do, it seems like a pretty nice package.

#limbo Did you ever wonder what would have happened if the boy from Limbo had reunited with his sister? And say, gone on a safari in Africa? More »

#screenshot I live out in the western part of San Francisco, and some mornings we get a lot of fog. "A lot" of fog to a San Franciscan is more fog than most people would even know what to do with. More »

Playdead is perking up, offering some scant details about its follow-up to 2010's Limbo via a listing for Danish interactive grant recipients spotted by superannuation. The game has a working title of "Project 2" and is slated for PS3, Xbox 360, PC and Mac.

The game will follow "a boy's struggle against evil forces trying to take over the world through questionable experiments on human bodies," as superannuation translates it. "Project 2" is a 2D platformer in a 3D world and is "in color," though from the screenshot above it looks as if those colors may have been scraped from Limbo's leftovers.

Playdead received £1,000,000 from the Danish government to work on "Project 2." It began working on this title in 2010 and set its production time at "three and a half years," superannuation notes, bringing its launch to an estimated 2014.

Limbo's austere presentation would absolutely shatter if the game's protagonist found Alan Wake's trusty flashlight and started shining it all around. At least, that's what Dorkly posits in this clip revealing the happy land of Limbo.

#limbo Being chased through a black-and-white forest filled with blowgun-wielding natives, dangling corpses, and the gigantic silhouette of a spider sure is creepy. If only the hero of Limbo had remembered to pack a flashlight. More »

#supermario Call him a sell-out. Call him a suit. Call him too mainstream. It doesn't change the fact that Mario was jumping and saving imperiled females before it was cool. More »

Steam's Autumn Sale continues today, with some spectacular sales on Limbo ($2.49), Civilization 5 ($10.19), the Overlord complete pack ($4.99) and more. There's also a terrible sale on Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, wherein Steam is still asking people to actually pay for it.

Steam is also offering franchise sales on The Witcher, F.E.A.R., Tom Clancy and, to keep the excitement at manageable levels, Kane & Lynch titles.

PlayDead announced today that Limbo has sold over one million copies worldwide. The game has been sold in 153 different countries and has been translated into nine languages. The game was originally released on Xbox Live in July of 2010. It expanded to PlayStation 3 in July of 2011, and was released on Steam in August. A Mac version will also be available before the end of the year...

Hollywood has a difficult time innovating itself, usually running through film fads in periodic bursts of explosions, war dramas, too-witty children backed by indie-band soundtracks and 3D fantasy. Something truly different, yet just as resonant, is unlikely to be made in the backlot of Paramount Studios, with a huge budget and attention-grabbing actors. For example, a film based on Limbo won't be getting mainstream funding any time soon. That doesn't mean it shouldn't.

The Tide is a short-film project inspired by and created in the same art style as Limbo, in production from Samsquanch Films. Unsurprisingly for such a special-effects-loaded movie, it needs funding from some good people who like great games and movies. The Tide's Kickstarter offers goodies for your green, including T-shirts, stickers, associate producer credit, a role in the film and a custom oil painting. Besides, walking on top of monkey bars is hard -- surely these guys deserve a few bucks to help pay for the imminent hospital bill.

Dino Patti, boss at Limbo developer Playdead, doesn't like retail. In fact, he's pretty anti-physical media in general. "Driving discs in a big van all over the world is really inefficient," he told Eurogamer in a recent interview. "I don't understand how anyone can make money out of this. Driving a truck to Japan just to get it delivered to people when they can get it from the net? Hopefully the new consoles will embrace the download space even more." Okay, we're picking up what he's throwing down, but what about flying discs all around the world? Surely that's cheaper and more efficient?

Joking aside, Patti's also against having to install console games, which he considers strictly PC territory. "It should be more like plug and play. The first consoles were cartridges. When it takes one hour to install Gran Turismo 5? I don't know. Obviously it improves performance, but they should be able to build consoles with better performance from the disc drive." We like watching Solid Snake smoke cigarettes as much as the next blog, but we admit he has a point here. Of course, install times have come a long way since then, but we understand Patti's frustration.

While we certainly wouldn't mind an all-digital future, we understand some people just like their physical media; a desire to hold the disc in their hand and smell a fresh instruction booklet. It's just how it is, even if it is a little bit weird.

#playdead Denmark-based indie developer Playdead was created with one goal—to produce Xbox Arcade game Limbo. Since the game premiered in 2010, it has been also been developed for the PlayStation Network, and for the PC on Steam. More »

We'd heard before that Playdead, the creators of last year's breakout hit Limbo, were working on another title, and now Edge Magazine has learned that there's good news and bad news. The good news is that the next game will use the Unity Engine, which means that Playdead won't have to roll its own game engine this time around, leaving it free to conquer other tasks in the "ambitious" project.

But the bad news that it will take a long time anyway: Three years or more. "A good game takes time," says CEO Dino Patti. "I think the new production will take at least three and a half years."

That's a long time -- even if Playdead already started when we talked about it last October, we're still looking at another few years of development. In other words, the Wii U will be out and running before we get to play this one. Take your time, though, Playdead -- we'll wait.

Updates to Limbo have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The changes include:

- A crash bug caused by custom DPI setting in windows has been fixed
- Controller detection has been improved
- Option to change resolution and windowed mode added to settings.txt

See the sticky Limbo FAQ on the forums for more information:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2047244

Having played and reviewed Limbo yesterday, John found himself at the end of Kieron’s (particularly sweary) disagreement gun, and as is always the case the two of them argued about it. An argument that can only be shared with the world. Whose side are you on? FIGHT!

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John thought Limbo was great, even if the PC-porting was a bit shonky. So perhaps you might be interested in winning a copy? I thought so. We’ve got twenty Steam codes to give away. Email us here with the answer to this question: “If you were stuck in limbo – the metaphysical/theological state, rather than the platform game – which PC gaming character would you want to be stuck there with?”

The most metaphysical answers, as judged by us, will win Steam codes. Usual rules apply. Closing date is midday, 10th August.