[Indie-gaming Tuesday] Limbo of the Lost (LoL)

Never before has the abbreviation "LoL" worked on so many levels.

I'm certain that the Internet-savvy among you have already heard about Limbo of the Lost, the game that so blatantly copied its graphics from about half a billion games. Seriously, they're so many that people have made a Wiki where they collect all the games Limbo of the Lost stole from.

I won't detail the whole story behind this game since the wiki does a really good job at it, but here's the gist of it: The game was "created" by Majestic studios, which is basically comprised of three people in their mid-to-late 30's from Kent, England, with their (now defunct) official site being a Geocities account. Wait, it gets better.

These three have been apparently been working on the game since the early 90's, since there's even a handful of screenshots from an Amiga version around. Which I find highly amusing, as those screenshots, and especially the main character, have nothing to do with the released version of the game on PC's. If anything, this raises the question if these people were indeed working on the game, or just waiting for more sources to steal from. I'm mentioning this especially since the current version of the main character looks exactly like Edward Norton's character from The Illusionist, a movie that's only a couple of years old.


As for the old version of the protagonist (seen here), I could swear I've seen him before, even though I can't quite say where exactly. I want to say I've seen him in Shadow of the Comet, but I know that's not right. I also feel like he was some sort of native American in the game where he originated from, but again I'm not too sure about that. In the off-chance that I'm wrong and he's an original creation, well, mea culpa.


(credit for this picture: Xabora from NeoGAF)

To make matters worse, the actual game is, according to most sources and from what we can see from in-game videos, an absolute pile of shit. The original graphics are atrocious (unaltered Poser models are unacceptable in free games, let alone retail ones), the voice-acting is worse than a House of the Dead game, and the gameplay and story seem to be unintentionally hilarious. I don't make a habit out of judging games without playing them, but some things are obvious. See for yourselves in this video which includes the intro sequence and the first 10 minutes of gameplay.

What makes my mind boggle is how this game ever managed to find a publisher. Assuming that nobody noticed how bad this game was, or perhaps that they did notice and decided it'll sell as a cult-"Oh my gods this game is unbelievably shitty"-hit, how could this game have passed whatever passes for quality control these days, when it has so obviously stolen from virtually most of the big-name games in recent years? I really can't wrap my head around that.

Whatever the truth behind this story is, we'll probably never find out since the people responsible for this mess have seemingly disappeared. I don't blame them for that, and I don't offer any sympathy for them as they deserve whatever comes to them, but I have to say I do feel kind of bad for their families. C'est la vie, I guess.

I could easily imagine that after reading all this, you'd be somewhat intrigued by Limbo of the Lost and the story behind it, if probably for the wrong reasons. I've been there, myself. Trust me when I say that life is too short to waste time and money on something as shitty as this. For that reason, here's a video of the game's ending, hopefully it'll satisfy your curiosity and you'll move on to other, more worthwhile things.



On the bright side, this catastrophe of a game release has inspired some people to get creative and give us some laughs. It ain't all bad!

In other news, I rented the new Alone in the Dark game today, and while that's been receiving some fairly bad reviews itself, I'm still looking forward to playing it. Alone in the Dark 3 will always be the definitive game of the franchise for me, though. If partly for nostalgia reasons.

TL;DR version:

Remember kids, stealing and plagiarism is bad. Especially in this era, where Internet sleuths investigate every little detail about you and your products. So do yourself a favor and don't end up like the dumbfucks responsible for Limbo of the Lost, a game worthy of ridicule and little else.

And if you're a douchebag and still decide to steal assets from other games, thus helping to give the indie scene a bad name, at least make sure your game is actually decent. Do us all a favor, or the universe will most likely assplode as a result of having two games like LoL around.