Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

Amusement parks have those gigantic stuffed animal prizes. Not a simple feet to claim one for your own, but if you do I imagine carrying one of those fat beasts around is as convenient as trying to cook dinner with a golden retriever biting your ball sack. So we most likely avoid playing "throw a ring into the bottle" and encourage our pets to use their tongue instead of their teeth.

Limbo is an obvious choice for catch of the week, considering we're fishing in the gulf two days shortly after the BP incident. The story seems intriguing enough, the controls don't require a mouse, and you're computer doesn't need to be built like Mike Tyson to play it. But kids sometimes just have to get in the way of good things, don't they?

In Limbo you control a kid who moves like a kidney stone in space. He's in search of...Well we don't know yet since the game pulls the old "drop the gamer into a world he doesn't understand and have him figure it out along the way" card. Not the worst card in the writer's story deck, but to keep things more grounded lets just assume he's looking for a bubble bath to clean himself of the oil and spider poop suffocating his body. Who knows, maybe a surprise will come and his mom will be there too with her big rack. As you'd expect, along the way are some nightmarish obstacles to interrupt your 2D platforming adventure. The worst of course being the bloody water, because for soe reason or another your pre-puberty Oliver Twist hasn't learned how to swim yet.

Timing is everything apparently. These days my attention doesn't stay focused on anything for too long. So as usual, I blame myself for not liking Limbo more than I do. It certainly has the shapes of entertainment, especially for those who are manic-depressives. But maybe it's just the process of dying over and over in a landscape pissed on by BP, a landscape which blinds our virgin eyes from what might cause death and what causes the swimsuit edition of sports illustrated to arrive early this year, that really gets to me.

Humphrey Bogart was never that trigger happy.