Review: LIMBO

we've decided to start doing video game reviews. so here goes:

I finaly bought Limbo the other day. (on XBLA, for 1200 mp)
you play as the siluet of a small child with a big head, who has died? i think... and is lost and trapped in Limbo (the place between heaven and hell) looking for his dead sister, who's been kidnapped? there is no context or plot what so ever. no text and no dialogue. and no tutorial which i love! i swear i lay in the grass at the beginning for a good ten minuets before i realized there was nothing to tell me that i could get up.
It's a 2D puzzle platformer/ horror game that involves running through the siluet of a big dark scary world, mainly forrest and caves, but theres some urban areas later on and a slaughter house/ heavy machinery section too. you run for about a minuet straight before you enconter your first puzzle and it continues from there.
it's really really fun and interesting, but it's quite short and nothing is explained. i finished the game in one night, and got very frustrated on the puzzels towards the end that just killed you if you got the timing a split second off. where as the earlier puzzels where more about ingenuity.
There were some incredible sirring scences (like when you get chaced by a massive spider for the first portion of the game. forcing you to do the puzzles quckly to try and escape it) and it was incredibly immersive, apart from when you die. the problem i had. was that everytime i began to get sucked in, and really feel like I  was the small child lost in the big dark forest. i would die and be instantly re spawned 5 feet away. which broke the flow a bit. plus because of the art syle you can never tell what will and wont kill you.
or maybe the insta respawn and no lives is just part of the in games story. that in limbo you can'tdie you just come back straight away, but you still feel the pain of dying everytime it happens. in which case that's incredible deep. i suppose it's more like art in that respect, some people understand it, some people don't. it has a different meaning to each individual person. speaking of which video games have now officialy been declared as Art. (i think, unless John was trolling me)
back to limbo: it's very short (as i said earlier) and it's disapointing that the last 20 minuets of game play is a load of physics puzzles involing gravity switches to avoid spinning saws of death.
i'd also like to say that when i saw and intereting killing devise i would occaion jump into it just to see what happens ( like when theres to cogs tht slowly spin and if you move into it they crush your head in.)

this is one of my favorite kinds of game though, it's puzzle based, it's scary and immersive. it's greusome but in a cool way (not "oh wow lets just put blood everywhere" way) and, as far as i can tell, it lets each person get a different experince out of it. it's linear (as in there is only one way to do each thing otherwise you die) but you have fun trying to do it. and the plot is left up to the player to decide what's actualy going on.
so in conclusion it's fun, but short. it's pretty, but too expensive. i feel as though it should be 800 mp not 1200. but then i also feel quite privlaged to play such a good game for such a high price (like eating at a posh resaraunt). so if you have the money. i recomend it.

- Will