I’m more of a first person/third person slasher/shooter fan myself but Limbo is unlike any other game I’ve played. Most of the indie platform titles I’ve come across (on a Mac) have been unimaginative and forgettable. Limbo, on the other hand, is dark, ambiguous, atmospheric and surprisingly moving.

A boy wakes up at the ‘edge of hell’ and encounters bear traps, giant spiders and a girl. The player gets to control the boy’s movements and perform some basic actions like jumping, climbing and interacting with objects. As the (very short) game progresses, things get darker and creepier;  you die many times before you figure out what to do. And the deaths are gruesome – plenty of decapitating and impaling. The puzzles get progressively harder and the deaths, more horrifying.

The developers were spot-on in recreating the noir look and feel reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s M, Metropolis and other German Expressionist films. The story is weird and uncomfortable and the ending is open to interpretation (or perhaps, no interpretation at all). Sadly the game clocks in at less than 5 hours and costs 1200 points if you’re on XBox Live.

For me, this is the closest a video game gets to being a work of art.

German Expressionism, it is said, rose not because of an artistic revival but because German film makers found it hard to compete with the extravagance of their Hollywood counterparts; so they resorted to symbolism and darker subtexts. F W Murnau‘s Nosferatu was one of the earlier expressionist forays into film making and is widely considered a masterpiece. It is not the plot per se that strikes one, but the imagery; beautifully shot in black and white (well, they didn’t really have a choice there) and a genuinely creepy performance by Max Shreck as Count Orlock.

One of the primary reasons I watched the film was thanks to 2000′s Shadow of the Vampire, where Willem Dafoe plays a fictionalized version of Max Shreck. At 78 minutes, the film is quite easy to sit through and for a 1922 silent era film, quite entertaining too.

Say Anything: Cameron Crowe (1989)

If there’s one genre that’s well and truly dead, it’s the romantic comedy genre. What passes off as romance these days is mostly crammed with fart jokes and gratuitous sex. What happened to the days when the hero was an upright, optimistic and by and large ethical gentleman? Say Anything, Cameron Crowe‘s (Jerry Maguire) 1989 directorial debut is a surprisingly smart, adequately mushy and thoroughly quotable gem. John Cusack plays (a younger version of a role he would play in High Fidelity) an extremely average, kickboxing enthusiast of a 19 year old grappling with career choices et al when he falls hook, line and sinker for the over achieving Ione Skye. I could say that it’s devoid of cliches but the fact is most later films in the genre have lifted something or the other from this one.

Cameron Crowe’s films have all had amazing soundtracks and this one’s no exception. Add to that a very likable couple, a great scene involving a boom box and some very memorable lines; almost as good as High Fidelity. Almost.

Nobody thinks it will work, do they?
No. You just described every great success story.

Links:

• Scene from Shadow of the Vampire
• Nosferatu: Entire film