That sucks! Those are two amazing games. Sorry to hear that the co-founders are feuding…
How good are these games? Are they worth buying before the delisting just to have them?
Limbo is a great game, Inside is a fucking masterpiece.
Limbo is the archetypal “scared little guy in big scary world dark artsy platform-puzzle indy game”. Personally I found it overrated. Nice enough art style, but nothing of substance - extremely basic gameplay, no plot. Just a series of scary monsters killing you until you trial-and-error your way to the next section.
I played both, loved them but I understand it’s not for everyone, given the creepy/dark atmosphere.
The creepy/dark atmosphere is actually the thing that appeals to me about them! It’s the platforming and puzzles I am worried about.
Platforming is not supposed to be tricky and the puzzles are really well designed and manageable (I usually look up puzzle solutions after a few minutes and never had the urge during Limbo or Inside).
Having played both, the answer is definitely yes. They’re not particularly long, but really solid
I really enjoyed them, but I wouldn’t say there’s any replayablility there. I enjoy the dark atmosphere and a lot of the fun for me was just the discovery and seeing what sort of creepy stuff coming next. Once the games were finished I didn’t feel the urge to play them again.
I haven’t played inside, but limbo is absolutely fantastic.
Inside was better than Limbo for me, if that helps. Limbo was cool, but Inside had crazy atmospheric storytelling.
Both look really cool, but I am really not a big platformer guy so I’m unsure. Inside is 90% off on GOG though so might pick it up for a dollar and a half. Limbo is full price and even though it’s just $10 I don’t know that I’d like it enough. How hard is the platforming and the puzzles?
they’re not really platformers like, eg. Mario, they’re a lot slower with the focus being on environmental puzzles (levers, boxes, elevators, avoiding obvious enemy sight etc), with the occasional escape sequences here and there. The puzzles aren’t really any sort of headscratchers, basically “how do I get there? oh, I drop this box to break the floor here (telegraphed hard)”
If Little Nightmares -series is familiar, they’re basically like that. While the puzzles aren’t hard, they’re generally timed to allow the obvious enemy to get close enough for the player to “pucker up” a bit and then flee the scene with a relief.
Let’s just say I also don’t play platformers, basically ever. It was fine.
People love them. They’ve talked about them for years. They show up on best indie game lists and the like.
I find them incredibly boring.
What is difference between any platform like itch or GOG if they will also delist games? Game preservation my ass, piracy is the true preservation.
EDIT: Relevant video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-ejBTJeu74
Delisted just means it’s no longer for sale, not that you can’t download it or play it.
GOG and itch’s approach to preservation is always gonna be limited by legality, you can’t keep a game on your platform if the publisher requests its delisting; ofc piracy isn’t constrained by this, so it’s inherently better at preservation
at least, since the games on there don’t have DRM, once you have them you keep them (and with GOG, you can also download offline installers that you can reuse on any computer you want). they make piracy (and therefore preservation) way easier in that way, because pirates don’t even need to repack the game!
Not having DRM is better for piracy. So in a way they’re helping “true preservation” more than other platforms that allow DRM.
GoG is very much about the marketing of game preservation. That said, to my knowledge, they (like Steam) don’t remove it from your account. Just from the store. So if you bought it, you can still play it.
GoG is a bit better in that their DRM model only requires you to authenticate to download, not reinstall. So you can theoretically archive all of your purchases if you have way more storage than you should. But it also is horrible at surfacing when an installer has an update so… mostly this is only viable for truly dead games.
I like GoG a lot as a platform but it has always rubbed me wrong that they pretend they are focused on game preservation. But that also might be because I am old enough to remember The French Monk incident.
Yeah I don’t think GOG has removed delisted games from users libraries.
Unfortunately it did happen to Oxenfree on itch instead of letting people who bought it retain access to download it after delisting. https://www.pcgamer.com/games/adventure/another-reminder-that-your-digital-library-isn-t-forever-oxenfree-will-be-completely-removed-from-itch-io-next-month/
It’s DRM free. Just practice good backups man. No need to jump to piracy.
What about the next generation of kids that want to play old classics, or just plain ol patient gamers that never got to it? If it’s just people that have private personal backups, then it’ll eventually die with them and be lost forever to time.
Existence is entropy. Everything you love will be dust one day. That is natural and good.
This post isn’t about the games being removed from the face of the internet. It’s just one platform.
It’s too early to panic.
Lol, should they just keep the games up? See if any blood hungry lawyers notice? (Piracy is probably the best way to preserve though, I will agree on that.)
