Poker Night at the Inventory came out last week, but it’s only thanks to the holidays that I was able to finally play it. Considering the caliber of people involved, it’s no surprise that it’s really well done, but you know, I had to be sure.

Let’s all be honest here: it’s a bizarre, tough sell of a concept. But the idea of taking something weird and just running with it is what attracted me to Telltale in the first place. The best aspects of Telltale games have always been the weird sense of humor and the polish of the choreography and camera work. Maybe this’ll be the game that gives people an idea what Telltale games are like, even if they’d normally be scared away from adventure games.

And, dude: five dollars. Plus Team Fortress 2 unlocks.

I’ve started two games of Civilization 5 and finished one. There are plenty of reviews already, and Giant Bomb’s review has a walk-through video of the first 45 minutes. There’s nothing much I could add to those. But I can make the hell out of a list.

One More Turn
I can tell I’m getting older, because games like this are getting less charming. There’s no getting around it: if you start a game of any version of Civilization, you’re all but guaranteed to find yourself suddenly realizing it’s three AM and you’ve just lost the better part of a day. Sometime over the last few years, that went from being an acceptable risk to being a genuine liability. And the Civilization Addicts ads seem less funny and more harrowing when you’re finding yourself no longer able to be a productive adult.

Every version of Civ has been like that, but I think the accessibility-plus-depth combo of Civ 5 makes it the most dangerous yet. The streamlined UI means you’re always presented with a clear list of stuff to do, but the fact that the guts of the full game (not a streamlined version like in Revolutions) means that that list will keep driving you to one more turn.

They Should’ve Sent a Poet
This isn’t just the most beautiful release in the Civilization series; it’s one of the best-looking games I’ve seen. What’s most important is that they’ve just nailed the art direction: it hits just the right spot between painterly and realistic. Going too realistic with a Civ game just feels off, since there’s so much weird abstraction going on. But the past couple of versions (and Revolution) have strayed too far in the opposite direction: either too cartoony to suit the epic tone of the game, or else an uncomfortable mash-up of realism and cartoon.

I’m continually amazed by how far game rendering tech has come. Visuals like this have always required 2D or lots of trickery, and it’s still kind of alarming to me to be able to zoom in and out of a painting, and see 3D models walking around on its 3D-modeled surface. And aside from some high-profile exceptions, it’s great to see developers not assuming that the natural end result of better tech is photo-realism. What it really does is give art teams the power for genuine artistic interpretation. Playing Civ 5 (on medium settings, the most my three-year-old quad-core Mac Pro can handle) makes me even more anxious for a new version of SimCity: a city building game with this level of detail would be amazing.

Difficulty Curve
The running thread through most of the reviews seems to be that this is a cross between Civilization Revolution and a deeper Civ game. I can see that, to an extent: Civ 4 had a little too much going on, with religion and espionage sub-systems bolted on top of everything instead of feeling like genuinely integrated systems. The franchise needed some streamlining.

Still, even though the UI is unquestionably improved, and the advisors and tutorials are actually helpful again (unlike Civ 4), I can’t imagine how I’d handle Civ 5 if it were my first exposure to the series. The apples-and-shields relationship that was so clear in Civ 2 and Civ 3 is now buried under layers of automation. You can still micromanage everything if you want, and it’s definitely better for experienced players that you don’t have to micromanage. But in a game that demands as much learn-as-you-go as Civilization, it’s a little unsettling being so far removed from the number-crunching that’s going on underneath.

I will say that the difficulty levels are scaled differently than earlier Civ games. The third difficulty level has traditionally been the sweet spot for me: I could win about 50% of the games. But in Civ 5 I won my first game at that level, and it was absolutely no contest. Sure, it’s a good idea to minimize player frustration, but that was always inherent to Civilization for me: so many times I’d be absolutely trounced by the AI by the time the Renaissance hit, so that the few times I was able to win were a lot more rewarding.

Culture
The culture subsystem was my favorite addition to Civ 3, since it made a peaceful victory genuinely feasible. Its effect on your city was understandable and visible; you could see your cities’ borders expand and understand exactly what the benefit was — especially when you had a city putting out so much culture that it automatically absorbed cities nearby. In Civ 5, though, it’s been abstracted to the point of being less clear as a simulation, but somewhat better for the gameplay. Culture still expands your borders, but not into another civ’s territory. And when you can just buy a tile, the border-expansion game feels a lot more mechanical and less like something growing organically out of the simulation.

Having culture output go towards civic policies makes sure that culture is still useful, but it’s also less intuitive. Unless all your culture is going to production of Les Miserables, it’s not clear how building a theater helps you enact a libertarian government. The policies themselves are welcome; it adds a process of leveling-up your Civ that’s familiar to anybody who’s played an RPG. But the cultural victory no longer has anything to do with border expansion, and is now just a matter of acquiring enough civic policies. It’s a little like playing an RPG and winning the game not when you beat the boss, but when you just gain a level.

City States
The City States are one of those things that seem like a fantastic concept that kind of fell apart during implementation. The reasoning behind them makes so much sense, it’s ingenious: they get you involved in diplomacy earlier in the game, instead of wandering around slugging barbarians for thousands of years. They give you objectives for more directed play, something the Civ series has never had. And it acknowledges how important city-states were to world history: the Civilization series is still one of the only series of games that have genuine educational merit to them. Plus, it’s just nice to see a bunch of allies suddenly turn on an enemy once you declare war.

It’s also bizarre that the city states don’t progress the same way as civilizations, but instead on par with the most advanced player. You end up with a city suddenly able to churn out tanks and infantry units while everyone around them is still making spearmen.

But your interaction with them is so limited, it ends up being more frustrating than satisfying. It would help if there were more genuine diplomatic options than just giving the money or running errands for them. I’m hoping that one of the inevitable expansions puts more content into the city-state relations.

Technology Trading
Tech trading is gone with Civ 5, and it’s conspicuously absent since it’s always seemed like an inherent part of the franchise. I can’t say I miss it, though, since it never seemed to work like it was intended. It always ended up with the AI civs forming a consortium among themselves and screwing me out of all the good tech. The downside is that you have to stay generalist: you no longer have the strategy option of specializing in one branch of the tech tree and then getting the rest through trading.

Combat
Most of the changes to Civ 5 are examples of compromise. The change to the combat system is the only thing that’s unquestionably better. I’ve always treated combat in Civ games like a necessary evil, but this is the first version where I’ve actually enjoyed it. Properties of units used to be just a simulation-driven rock-paper-scissors relationship, but now there’s a genuine tactical advantage to having ranged units versus melee ones. Combined with the cities’ new ability to defend themselves, it really puts the emphasis back on units instead of stacks. And the UI shows you the outcome of each battle in advance, so you’re making genuine tactical decisions instead of just throwing units at each other to see what happens. I feel like this is the version of combat the previous games were trying to make but could never quite get it right.

Overall
All of the changes to Civ 5 (except combat) have their downside, but overall I think this is a big net gain. This is definitely my favorite version of the game. I’ve played a ton of Civilization over the years, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert by any stretch, so I can’t speak to the depth of the strategy game. But this is the most fun I’ve had with the series, even more than with Civilization Revolution. And if it’s this enjoyable out of the box, it’s going to be exciting to see what changes and improvements come with the expansions. For now, though, I’m wasting time that could be better spent playing it.

I was reading a message board discussion about Telltale’s Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse, and there were a couple of people understandably confused about the big dump of back-story that’s given towards the end of the last episode. Specifically, Stinky’s story. I started to respond there, but figured I might as well put it here so that people could get to it if interested.

It’s fairly interesting as an example of how episodic development differs from regular game development — it was supposed to be kind of a long-running gag that was constantly simmering in the background, but it kept getting pushed out of the way as each episode’s own story got more involved and each episode’s writer & designer told their own story. It was further complicated by the fact that it was supposed to work two ways: if you’d played all of season 2, then it was a huge retcon to explain/undo a lot of the ridiculous stuff in that season that we intentionally never paid off on. If you hadn’t, then it was just a ridiculously convoluted non-sequitur meant to poke fun at anyone expecting Sam & Max to make sense. I’m still not sure what exactly is the best post-mortem lesson there for anybody to take advantage of, other than the obvious “keep it simple.”

So here’s the story in detail, at least how it was intended (I could be off on some details that some of the other writers may have filled in or changed along the way).

Huge spoilers for seasons 2 and 3 of Sam & Max follow, so you should probably only read if you finished those seasons and are feeling confused and/or curious.

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I’m told that the last episode of Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse is out now for Windows and Mac, tomorrow for the PS3. Telltale’s got a deal where season 3 is twenty bucks and all three seasons is forty.

The last episode is called “The City That Dares Not Sleep”, was written by me, directed by Jake RRODkin, and made by lots and lots of people at Telltale. I haven’t gotten to play it yet (and probably won’t until I get back from Georgia), but I’m looking forward to it. What I saw during recording the DVD commentary looked like they knocked the presentation up several notches.

My favorite joke in the game, assuming it stayed in: look at the TV screen in the arm controls. Or the based-on text. I’m also happy that it managed to cram in references to Space: 1999, The Wrath of Khan, every previous Sam & Max game, R’lyeh, Fantastic Voyage, The Beast Must Die!, William Butler Yeats, two of Steve’s gags from brainstorming, rampant misogyny, and poop jokes. Definitive proof that Roger Ebert was wrong.

Last week, Leigh Alexander wrote an article on Gamasutra about the lack of female lead characters in games at Activision, and by extension throughout the industry. She relays the story of a development studio that was working on a game with “an Asian female assassin… modeled on actress Lucy Liu,” until an order came down from Activision to “lose the chick.” The original project was subsequently taken over by a different studio and released as the third part of an existing series. Alexander’s unnamed sources draw a connection between extensive focus-testing, a desire to repeat the biggest financial successes of previous years, the perception that there’s no market for games with anything other than male lead characters, and the under-representation of women and minorities in games.

It’s an even-handed article, but there are two pretty clear targets for criticism: focus testing and, for lack of a more convenient word, sexism. I was reminded of Alexander’s article by a post by my ex-coworker Brett Douville’s blog talking about the focus-testing aspect of the story. I don’t have much to add, there, since it’s fairly straightforward: big companies make decisions based on focus testing; making decisions based on focus-grouped metrics and sales figures is deadly to creativity and innovation; individual developers, and studios seeking publishing or buy-out agreements, need to know the extent a publisher makes decisions based on focus testing, so they can decide who to work for or who to make business deals with.

I will say a couple of things, though: first, focus testing isn’t inherently evil. (Whether Activision is, is still up for debate). It’s easy to decry it as the most obvious example of The Suits keeping down The Creatives — I’ve done plenty of decrying myself — but if used correctly, it can be extremely valuable. Back before they merged with the taint of Activision, and were still just known for making preposterously well-balanced and polished games, Blizzard touted frequent play-testing and iteration as one of the keys to their success. Same with Valve, who is, at the time of this writing, yet to make itself known as evil. “Creative control” is laudable up to the point where you’ve clung to your own personal vision at the expense of everything else — the trick is being able to distinguish when you’re getting useful feedback from when you’re getting arbitrary meddling.

And speaking of arbitrary: would focus testing and publisher interference be given so much attention if the situation had been reversed? If a studio had been developing a game with a male space marine as its lead character, and the publisher had insisted that it be switched to a woman, for no better reason than because “women are under-represented” or even “games with chicks sell better,” would that get such a negative response? I’m skeptical.

The only other bit I wanted to mention from Brett’s post was in response to this: “It’s also worth noting that this article received more than ten dozen comments, which is far more than any other news item in the last week or so… clearly this touches some sort of nerve.” And I’d say yes, it touched a nerve because it was designed to: sexism + the current Evil Giant Corporation in the minds of videogamers + creative control ripped from honest developers == instant internet indignation. But I’ve got to point out that the bulk of those ten dozen comments — at least the ones I got through before I remembered why I never read blog comments anymore — were a couple of cranks having a typical pointless internet message board argument. Whenever you’re dealing with Things People Say On The Internet, it’s important not to confuse quantity with quality, or relevance.

And hey, quality over quantity is a good lead-in to what I really wanted to talk about: the sexy, sexy business of making videogames.

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I’ve noticed something about my own habits playing games on the iPhone, and I wanted to see how common it is, so I set up a poll for it.

The games that get the most play-time on my phone are the ones that support portrait orientation (Drop 7, Words With Friends, Helsing’s Fire, Bejeweled, etc), partly because I can jump in for a quick game while I’m otherwise occupied (read: on the toilet). If a game only supports landscape or plays better in landscape, I treat it more like a “real” game: I only start it up when I’m ready to devote a big chunk of time to it. If you play games on your iPhone, iPod Touch, Android phone, or whatever, help me out by answering the poll.

(If you feel inclined to explain, feel free to leave a comment too).

StarCraft 2 came out last week, and statistically speaking, it’s likely that you’ve already bought a copy. But what if you’re like me, someone who hates StarCraft but hates even more getting left out of the next big thing everybody else is doing?

Maybe “hate” is too strong, but it’s fair enough to say that the first StarCraft and I have a troubled history. The troubles went way past any one game, though; this was an abusive relationship that soured me on an entire genre. Maybe an analogy will help clarify:

Before I played StarCraft, it was a completely alien concept that I could be bad at videogames. I mean, I can and will lose games if pitted against another human, and there are things like racing games that I’ll never be good at because I can’t be bothered to care. But the idea that there could be a videogame with robots and spaceships and lasers in it, that I could play by myself against the computer on normal difficulty, and lose? Inconceivable!

It wasn’t a quick and merciful smackdown, either, but a prolonged bare-assed spanking. I’d believe I was doing fine and then slowly, systematically, and rigorously corrected. My breaking point? As early as the third mission in the game, where I’d have to defend a base against Zerg attacks for 30 minutes. I’d try it over and over again, each time thinking Now I know what I’m doing! and each time waiting 25 minutes until my inevitable destruction.

I don’t even want to think about multiplayer. I’ve seen otherwise relatively normal people sit down in front of StarCraft and become transformed, like a cyber-nano-hacker from a syndicated sci-fi series getting jacked into the FutureNet. Their eyes glaze over, their fingers begin furiously tapping keyboard shortcuts, things start blowing up and they’re freaking out over choke points. Even if it were at all possible for me to win against that, there’d be no joy in it, I’d be more machine than man at that point.

So by the time StarCraft 2 was announced, you’d think I’d have learned my lesson. Here was a game tailor made for the Blizzard obsessives who get obscenely fixated on damage per second. For people who’d spent the last 12 years playing this game, presumably making it past the third mission. Screenshots of the sequel were almost indistinguishable from the original (and from each other). It was, by most accounts, more of the same.

But I bought it anyway. And it is, indeed, instantly recognizable and familiar. And I did progress through a couple of simple missions that convinced me I knew what I was doing before hitting one that had me defending my base against Zerg attacks for 20 minutes.

Except this time, I did it. I definitely haven’t gotten better at RTS games in the years since the first game, so I can only figure that Blizzard applied their usual level of exhaustive playtesting to the game to make sure that people like me could play.

The single-player campaign on normal difficulty is right at my level of comfort: easy enough that I haven’t given up in frustration yet, but not so easy that I feel as if I’m being patronized. Plus, the single-player campaign feels like a real game, not just a series of levels tied together with cut-scenes that say “Look How Much We’ve Seen Aliens!” You can choose between different missions to take, there’s a little bit of character building and customization as you collect research and money to make unit upgrades, and you get to hang out in different rooms of your own spaceship.

All the cut-scenes are done in engine, too, which is kind of astounding. It’s fairly standard redneck space marine stuff, but it looks great. And the storytelling within the missions is a huge improvement on the first game’s, too. My first reaction when seeing the game in action was that I’d spent far too long seeing games with short development cycles. There’s a ton of content in StarCraft 2, and you can see all the years of development on the screen.

People better-versed in strategy games could describe the mission balance, unit variety, player matching, and multiplayer. I’m still early in the game; currently in the middle of a mission that has me defending my base against zombified colonists that only come out at night. That’s about five or six missions in, and each one has had its own hook to make it seem distinct. And even if things go downhill from here, I’m happy that the game’s already accomplished the impossible: I’m actually having fun playing the single-player campaign of an RTS. Everything looks, sounds, and feels like StarCraft, except I’m actually looking forward to getting back into it.

Now they just need to hurry up with Diablo 3 already.

Proust had a sponge cake, I’ve got a post from Richard Cobbett about how the comedy of Monkey Island 2 encompasses everything from the dialogue to the animation to the puzzle design. There’s been a good bit of Monkey Island retrospection since the special editions were released and Deathspank promised a return to form, combined with Diablo. Most of it with the same overall theme of “They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”

I’ve actually been surrounded by it for more than a year, since I was working at a studio continuing the series. And after sitting in on a couple of early design meetings, and reading posts on message boards, and reading reviews and retrospectives, and playing the special editions, I was forced to come to an unsettling conclusion: I don’t like the Monkey Island games anymore.

Inevitably, that’s going to be perceived as embittered grousing on my part, or at best an attempt at “I’ve outgrown adventure games” posturing. But I assure you that that’s not the case. There’s no shortage of people complaining and criticizing on the internet, because it takes absolutely no skill or intelligence to say something sucks. I don’t see the point in just knocking something, because there’s nothing to be gained from it.

No, for me it’s more like being the one person in the crowd who stares at the Magic Eye picture and squints and crosses his eyes until they water but just can’t see the dolphin that everyone else is raving about. Actually, it’s more tragic than that, since it’s coming from someone who used to be able to see it.

The Tales of Monkey Island series was in good hands, because the team was full of people who loved the Monkey Island games (at least, the first two). They could give details on even the most fleeting moments and briefly-seen locations in the games, where the names of the islands, governors, and various pirates weren’t just places and characters in a story but part of a collective consciousness. They had several favorite scenes — several of which I’d forgotten — and could explain not only what happened but how and why they worked so well. It was the best kind of egoless enthusiasm for the games, driven to make a worthy successor no matter what the constraints.

And for a while, I thought it was simply the case that I’d shared that enthusiasm, and then gotten it all out of my system while working on an earlier continuation of the series. But after hearing some people talk about the games, I’m not so sure. During the brainstorming for the Telltale series, and then again in Richard’s essay, people would talk about the “darkness” of the games. That the magic of the first two games was tied to the combination of anachronistic slapstick humor and a darker, more sinister story of ghosts, voodoo, graves, ominous fortresses, and menacing villains. Chris Remo, master of the concise encapsulation, said “I never really associated the Monkey Island games with comedy (I rarely actually laughed) so they aged well for me.”

Which implies that it’s not just that I can no longer see the dolphin, but it wasn’t even a dolphin that everybody else was seeing. It was a great white shark with rail guns on its fins. And powered by a Nazi brain. It’s bad enough not to be able to join in on nostalgia; it’s worse to hear that your nostalgia isn’t even as cool as everybody else’s.

I bought the special edition of the first game when it came out, and I played through it, and it was kind of painful. I could still vividly remember playing the original on my Amiga in college, and I could remember thinking that it was unlike anything I’d seen before. So it was frustrating trying to revisit it and being, well, frustrated. And annoyed. And simply not enjoying the early-90s comedy stylings as much as I had in the early 90s.

But the second one was always my favorite, so I bought the special edition for that as well, twice even. (They really should’ve labeled the iPad and iPhone versions better). And I played through the first fifteen minutes or so, and stopped, and I’m reluctant to dive back in. Partly because adventure games don’t appeal to me as much as they used to. Partly because I still remember some of the puzzle solutions, and I’d miss getting the “a-ha” moment of discovery. Partly because I used to be able to appreciate it as a series of corny jokes and goofy animations, but those don’t entertain me anymore. And mostly because I’m pretty sure my memory of the game is better than anything that could possibly be delivered.

(For the record, it’s not just nostalgia. Sam & Max Hit the Road has gotten better with age, and the animations of the Cone of Tragedy and Sam reading the robot instruction manual still crack me up).

So the comedy no longer works for me like it used to. The drama that other people seem to see has never worked for me. And I’m definitely not crazy about the puzzles; at one point I had the patience to spend minutes or hours working out some obscure adventure game puzzle solution, apparently, but those days are long gone. I’d almost think that my opinions were lining up with one of the writers on Rock Paper Shotgun, something I never thought possible.

But that’s not it, either. Paradoxically, playing through the special editions and not particularly enjoying them has given me a new appreciation for them. Nothing can survive that long on pure nostalgia; there’s got to be something that made those games (especially the second one) stand out in so many people’s memories.

That something, I think, is the sense of experimentation that comes from figuring out how to do something genuinely new: using a videogame to tell a story. Not to mimic a movie or a cartoon, not to use story as context for gameplay, and not as a backdrop for puzzles. Plenty of people (including, I believe, the guys who made the game) have tried to single out one aspect or another as the element that defines a Monkey Island game, but it doesn’t work without that overriding sense of purpose. The meanwhile cut-scenes, the insult sword-fighting, the dialogue trees, none of that’s as interesting or as novel as the environment that made them seem like good ideas.

Maybe there’s a lesson there: developers need to get out of their comfort zones and put themselves in situations that require more novelty. The Monkey Island games weren’t the first to use cut-scenes, dialogue trees, or adventure game puzzles, but I believe they were the first to recognize them as tools to tell a story instead of just elements of a videogame. Instead of putting so much thought into what a character says in this interactive dialogue, maybe we should take a step back and ask whether an interactive dialogue belongs here at all.

So I’m not anxious to jump back into Monkey Island 2, but I’m not going to dismiss the continued appeal as nothing more than nostalgia for a genre long since made obsolete, either. It’s more of a mindset than anything else, and that’s something that doesn’t require any particular group of people, isn’t tied to any particular genre, and isn’t something that could only happen in the 90s before budgets got big and games got complicated. I suspect it just requires a willingness to throw out formula and experiment.

The new game Limbo has been getting a lot of buzz for what seems like a year now. It’s the first release in Xbox’s Summer of Arcade campaign, and it’s been getting a ton of great reviews, many of which use descriptions like “close to perfect.” For the most part, the hype is completely justified: Limbo is an outstanding game I’d recommend to anybody with patience and without a fear of spiders. And playing it should be mandatory for anyone making games.

But the problem with Limbo is that it sets such an extraordinarily high standard for itself at the beginning, and the rest of the game doesn’t live up to that. I’m not sure that it’d even be possible to live up to it. You’re dropped into the game controlling the silhouette of a small boy in the middle of the dark woods. The premise is that the boy is in Limbo, looking for his sister, but the only way you’d know that is from the description text when you buy the game; there’s no story setup, no voice and almost no text in the minimalist presentation. So you begin by walking to the right, and you soon encounter the first of the thousands of things in Limbo that will kill the boy, instantly and brutally.

You’ll die a lot while playing the game. It’s not an issue, since you’ll simply restart at the most recent checkpoint, and the checkpoints are, without exception, placed perfectly and predictably. But the die-and-try-again cycle is pretty indicative of the entire game. At the beginning, it works brilliantly: the deaths are sudden, gory, vicious, and even callous. It creates a sense of dread and apprehension more effectively than any game I’ve played since Silent Hill 2: this is a genuine horror game, one that makes the increasingly photo-realistic attempts at horror games seem clumsy and amateurish. I was taken in completely, startled every time a trap snapped shut, wary of walking any further. And even though I’m not particularly put off by spiders normally, I was genuinely repulsed by the ones in this game.

But as you go further in the game, that shock and feeling of apprehension wear off. Seeing the boy get killed just becomes a minor impediment, and you impatiently tap the A button to give the puzzle another try. And that’s the other thing: they become puzzles. Early on in Limbo, everything feels natural and perfectly integrated into the experience — as with any other puzzle game, you’re presented with an obstacle and all the pieces you need to get past it, but everything feels as if it’s supposed to be there. The further you progress, however, the more the puzzles seem contrived and puzzle-like.

And it’s a shame that that’s a complaint, because Limbo is an excellent puzzle game. There are only one or two puzzles that I’d call unfair, and the rest range from very good to genius. And “genius” isn’t an exaggeration — many of the puzzles and obstacles later in the game are the best I’ve ever seen in a videogame. What’s more, almost all of them are presented perfectly: it’s clear within seconds what the obstacle is, you’re given ample room to experiment instead of passively waiting for the a-ha! moment, and you’re given adequate feedback all without words or voice. There are perfectly subtle clues and hints throughout; one example is the minimalist soundtrack, which kicks in during the later puzzles to give you the rhythm you need to get past an obstacle.

I was extremely impressed with the game design, especially as I’ve gotten more and more frustrated with the wordiness (see: pot, kettle) and lack of challenge in videogames. Limbo is difficult, but with just a couple of exceptions, it’s never unfair. The challenge is in being forced to think; with most of the obstacles, after I’d figured out what to do, actually executing the solution was straightforward. And the solutions were frequently clever and satisfying, and for the first time in years, I actually felt smart while playing a game.

But it was still a game, where before there’d been this completely engrossing and captivating experience. I stopped empathizing with the little boy and started getting frustrated at the mushy jumping physics, or the extra jumps he’d unpredictably take at just the wrong moment, or the fact that he’d never learned to swim, or how long it took him to respawn after he was crushed by a giant weight or impaled on a spike. I encountered too many puzzles where you have to die at least once to even see what the obstacle is, so I stopped dreading the deaths and started seeing them as inevitable trial-and-error. I stopped thinking about secret caverns and spooky woods and scary spiders, and started thinking about platforms, switches, boxes, and physics puzzles.

If Limbo had been released with just the last 70% or so of the game content, then it would’ve been an ingenious puzzle game, a little on the difficult side, with amazing art and beautiful presentation. And it’s still one of the most impressive games ever released on XBLA. But after being so completely taken in at the beginning, I have to wonder what a game would be like if it could take that sense of dread and exploration and complete immersion in a nightmare, and carry it through the entire game.

(And for an example of what I mean by perfect presentation of a puzzle, I’ll describe my favorite puzzle set-up after the break. It’s spoiler territory, so best not to read it until after you’ve “finished” the game).

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