Limbo

In general I’m in favour of achievements in games. The 360 implementation is good with them feeding into gamerscore, the PS3 version is perhaps more interesting with it feeding into gamer levels and steam has… Well to be brutally honest I’ve never got an achievement in a Steam game.

What I don’t get are the game specific achievements. I’ve been playing Mirror’s Edge on the iPad and it has badges that are just for that game. They unlock wallpapers, which almost makes them useful but when they are just a measure of how well you’re doing in an individual game then they’re not really much more than something like leaderboards. They lose that something that pulls a platform together.

This week on Xbox Live Arcade they released a game called Limbo. It’s a gorgeous black and white indie puzzle game that is well worth a look. Being on Xbox there is a requirement for it though: It has to have achievements.

Xbox live arcade games must have 200points of achievements and since this is a linear puzzle game this does sort of limit your options. “Hurt the spider’s legs with a trap” is fine, but it does sort of tell you how to solve one of the puzzles. It also leads to a bad place which is to have the game throw achievements at you for completing each part of the game. Back when the 360 launched there was a King Kong game to tie in to the film and since the whole concept was new they didn’t really know what to do with them. In this case they dished out all 1000 points for various stages of completion and the game got a reputation for being an easy 1000 points. Which it was. This kind of scheme just doesn’t work; it does bring anything to your game and instead just says that you need to have them in your game and you have no idea how to add them.

Back to Limbo. There isn’t much in the way of self expression in this game as you’re just following a path. There isn’t much you can do that isn’t on that path, that isn’t a puzzle you have to beat, so I can imagine that the conversation as to how those 200 points were to be was quite interesting.

There are two achievements for completing the game. “Where Credit is due” is another usually lazy choice, which is to watch the credits until the end. Since you can only see these by completing the game this is actually the more usual “has won” achievement, but with an added complication of not skipping the credits at the end. They allocated a whole 100 points to this, which is half of their allocation. I think this says a lot about what they were thinking when they were brainstorming what to do.

The next is called “No Point in Dying”, which is 10 points and you get for completing the game in one sitting only having died a maximum of five times. Pretty standard stuff, they can get away with the one sitting part because the game is only a couple of hours long.

There’s only so much you can do with completing the game though, and there are still 90 points to dish out. What they seem to have done is make 10 achievements (two are 5 points) and added hidden objects to collect throughout the world. There would be no reason to collect these normally, they have no effect in the game so their reward is purely gamerscore.

I’ve chatted offline about how a game like Small Worlds (funnily enough) doesn’t need achievements, and in fact would change the entire tone of the game and I suspect the Limbo devs had the same conversations. Achievements must never exist just because they’re there. They’re rewards for doing things and incentive to try things. Complete the game, have a cookie. In the case of Limbo they’re an incentive to explore a bit more than you would with the game designed as it is. They don’t harm the narrative as you don’t know what’s going on anyway and so exploration is effectively what you’re doing anyway. Small Worlds is all about exploration, in fact that’s all there is and so rewarding that just falls into the % completion school of bad achievements.

They could be hidden in hard to reach areas. Again that changes the tone of the game and gives it a new goal. They’ll become the reason to play, the point of the game and the actual point will be missed.

I’m determined to come up with a workable achievement scheme for Small Worlds that’ll actually add to the game as it’ll annoy my Brother in a most delightful way. I’m impressed with how Limbo achieves this, but I’m unsure if I’m closer because of it.