Games are virtual. When you turn on the console, a world appears; when you turn it off, no trace remains. Except for the achievements you earned -- which fortify your Gamerscore and self-esteem, blip by blip. The Underachiever tracks the productivity of one gamer playing to catch up to his peers. What do games feel like when they're used for work?
The Joy of Drowning
I replayed Limbo to mop up the achievements I'd missed the first time around. Although I'd beaten the game and knew all of its puzzles by heart, it didn't feel any less terrifying than my first playthrough. The first Limbo encounter is all about blood, and the color black: knowing you will die, and not knowing when.
If you've played Limbo, you know what it feels like. The room is dark -- and it's moving -- and you fumble forward, half-expecting to impale your body on a spike. You aren't surprised when you fall into a deep pit. But you are dismayed that you survived the fall; you know the only way out is death. Usually in games, death is like falling off a bike: You brush yourself off and try again. In this game, death is part of your strategy. You miscalculate. Then, when you realize you are out of options, you reluctantly let the boy die. It's sickening to stand in the darkness, waiting for an iron ball to tumble into the deep pit and crush your head.
But this is the game's point. You do wait. Even though you tried again, avoided the pitfall, and grabbed the achievement you were hunting -- not without dying three more times -- the real currency that changed hands wasn't Gamerscore points. It was lives. 10G: Guided by Sparks cost me four.
Achievement runs in Limbo don't expand on the ideas or mechanics of the main game. They send you back for more of the same. Only one is realistically about exploration -- 5G: Wrong Way, which you get for running left instead of right at the start of the game. For the rest of Limbo, chances are you'll be too preoccupied with death to wander off and find one of the hidden eggs that unlocks an achievement. Like in some other games, it's more a matter of looking up the answer online and mastering the motions that take you there.
But Limbo isn't meant to test your dexterity like Trials HD. And it's not a hardcore platformer like 'Splosion Man or Mega Man -- games that gradually become familiar to the touch, like an instrument. In most games, the checkpoints are spaced to let you train yourself to pass a series of obstacles. You know that one day, you won't need them. Limbo, in contrast, traps you in a codependent relationship. When you die, you're returned to the same area just moments before, with very few exceptions. The game points at each mistake and watches closely as you try and try again. It doesn't give you any room to practice: The level design is unforgiving, the physics are precise, and each scenario differs radically from the last. Getting everything right feels like winning the lottery. So you feel grateful for the game's generosity.
Most of the achievements in Limbo are worth the same points (10) and are about the same thing: letting you experiment with your death. You can picture the solution in your mind, but you can't help slipping. You haven't figured out exactly how many inches up the incline to push the mine car, or how many split-seconds to wait before running across an industrial piston. When you finally get a grip, you've already dismembered or drowned the boy several times. It's a painful process. And the point of that process is to feel the boy's pain. One of the achievements, 10G: Under Ground, even forces you to kill the boy for your points.
By the game's ending, you have such a strong grasp of his suffering that you feel like you've been through something real. You're moved. It's a good game.
Achievements for watching a game's credit sequence are generally lame. But Limbo's 100G: Where Credit Is Due feels just as calculated as its gameplay. Why is this achievement worth 100 points? It's the hefty sum of all your preceding lives, sacrificed for the bigger picture that emerges in the ending. It's only appropriate that achievements like finding an egg on an elevated tree branch or in a hard-to-reach pipe are only good for 10. The eggs were placed there to trick you into dying, and that was the real object.
Unfortunately, this means Limbo isn't especially repayable. Once you've gotten through it, you've gotten it. It's another game that feels like a machine. You crank some levers, and meaning comes out. That's one reason I'll never attempt the 10G: No Point in Dying achievement for completing the game "in one sitting with five or less deaths." Of course there's a point in dying. Who cares about a skill run in a game that rewards you for your mess?
Achievements earned: 11
Points gained: 190
Ryan Kuo is an editor at Kill Screen Magazine, and a freelance writer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Find him on Xbox Live and Twitter as twerkface. And please don't laugh at his Gamerscore -- he's working on it.
