I actually recently wrote an essay on video games as Art. I wrote a huge section on LIMBO:
"LIMBO is a 2D platformer with a black and white color palette, a spooky playlist of background noises, one of hte scariest enemies in all of Games, and nearly every "Best Indie/Downloadable" award from 2010. The game focuses on a little boy going through a dark, spooky, and dangerous landscape that is mostly dark, spooky, and dangerous forest with a giant freaking spider. Along the way, puzzles, enemies, and a giant freaking spider hinder his, and the player's, path to progress, his sister, and the inevitable Game Over Credits. The game's simplistic controls and one-track objective combine with the bleak visuals and the almost noiseless background to engross the player fully into the little boy's trials and tribulations. It won't be rare that a player will be playing this game and scream when someone attempts to tap their shoulder to get their attention, they're that engrossed. It's akin to the silent movies of old, where it was actor skill and cinematographic ambience that stunned and entertained the masses instead of modern Baysplosions and simple quality of face in the bronzer members of the male cast.
While not a horror game, one will be surprised by the sudden jumps in the normally steady and quieter flow of going right, jumping, and pushing the odd block. The gruesome ways in which this little boy, who can't have more than ten years between his ears, meets his untimely end is quite disturbing. Surprise bear traps, spikes at the ends of slides down slippery slopes, spears thrown by unsavory folk, even giant giant unambiguous boulders don't discriminate according to age. The scariest of all the horrendous things in LIMBO is a horrendous, horrible, evil, disgusting, and somewhat intriguing beast, the aforementioned Giant Freaking Spider. This foe is unlike most other Big Bads in Literature or Cinema. Macbeth wanted the crown, Palpatine wanted the galaxy, Timur the Lame wanted Europe, Grendel wanted everyone to shut up for a little bit, but The Giant Freaking Spider is just hungry. The little boy is nothing more than another everyday snack to the spider. This kind of characterization can't be found in any other medium, because of the ability Games have to allow the player to experience the Spider themselves. The player understands how omnipotent the Spider is in this environment, it eats whatever it wants, and its sense of superiority over everything is evident in the way it "fights" the little boy. It just lazily waves one of its eight limbs about until the boy gets close enough, then CRACK, shish-kebab. Once the player shows his or her competence against this monstrosity, it leaves, frustrated that there was something that could dare challenge the utter power of The Giant Freaking Spider. It appears again, and actually traps teh boy, but escape occurs, and the gargantuan arachnid pursues. The Spider would die before it let anything escape its omnipotence. Even when a giant boulder falls on the creature, it keeps dragging itself forward with its last remaining limb slowly towards the boy before finally dying. It's sad, actually, the player has to cross a moat, but there's no platfo- that dead spider has only one quite buoyant leg that can easily be broken off. Do we see the corruption grow in Macbeth? Indeed. Do we cause this demise; does it hold personal weight with us? Are we an innocent child just trying to not be dinner? This Leviathan was felled by nothing by a boy and a player, and was humiliated by the same two. The air becomes thick, the mood bleak, and the Spiders spooky whenever, wherever, LIMBO is played. It's a shining example of Video Games' ability to create memorable characters and environments, and was all done by an Indie studio. Yep, low-budget, small-team work. LIMBO isn't just a game, it's a testament to the power some of the biggest companies in games are capable of, what studios like Bethesda, Bioware, Blizzard, and Bungie can do with their massive teams and even more massive budgets."
-Chillz
