Insert Credit: “Limbo”

The One Game You Need to Get This Week is a starkly gothic gem.

You may have noticed that things have changed here in IFCdotcom-land, and one of the new things we’ll be trying out is a recurring feature called Insert Credit.

Insert Credit endeavors to suss out where you should be allotting your video game allowance, sifting out a single title from many and crowning it as The One Game You Need to Get This Week. Don’t consider these reviews, gentle reader. Rather, think of Insert Credit as a mix of hands-on time, informed opinion and intuition.

For the week of July 20, 2010, you should insert credit into: “Limbo”

Created by the PlayDead dev studio out of Copenhagen, it’s already racked up awards from the Independent Games Festival. “Limbo” is being made available for download exclusively on the Xbox 360 as part of Microsoft’s annual Summer of Arcade digital distribution promotion. I spoke with PlayDead’s Dino Patti back in April after having had a bit of time with the game.

“Limbo” seethes with a beautiful and dangerous darkness that will leave you shivering as you play through it. At its heart, it’s a platformer with puzzle elements but everything’s so stripped down that it leaves its genre trappings behind and becomes something else. “Limbo” needs to seen, heard and played to understand just how seductive it is.

“Limbo” deserves your love, even if it will scare the life out of you.