I’m about to say something that will either get me on a special list in some government building somewhere, questioned vehemently by my editors, or both. Most games don’t let you kill kids, oddly enough that’s normal and isn’t questioned at all. In most games, you have the ability to kill an ox, big cats, big humans, ungodly creatures a million times their own size, vampires, aliens, and a whole host of other animals or humanoid equivalents. However, you’re not allowed to kill a kid because it would be “desensitizing to people,” which is already the claim by overbearing moral panic groups.

That being said, this week’s Epic Games store freebie is a grim, depressing, black and white, horror game about being a kid in the UK in the 70’s and not cleaning your room. Yes, Playdead’s Limbo is this week’s game, and it is one of the few titles on the market where it is OK to kill a kid. Yep, that’s the bit that will get me fired or arrested. However, it is true; you are encouraged to throw the child you play as into spikes, bear traps, spider legs, and other horrific means just to learn the puzzle at hand.

To some Limbo was the best game of 2011, a year packed with, Portal 2 (Electric Boogaloo), The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (never heard of it), Dark Souls (My sexual fantasy), Saints Row: The Third (it’s three-foot-long and hits your cheeks), L,A Noire, Bastion, Terraria, and The Binding of Isaac. In the year that spawned every game that’s been popular for the last nine years, Limbo very often stands out from the crowd. It is the progenitor to the game every indie developer makes now, it is the equivalent of typing “hello world,” and when someone wants to make an artsy game, Limbo is the design document.

If you are somehow like myself and have avoided Limbo for many years, now is the time to pick it up. If you’ve been playing all those artsy platformers like Gris, FAR: Lone Sails, and the mountain of other imitators, you might want to give this one a go. Limbo is available for free until the 25th of July.

Looking forward in time, Epic has made my life a little harder next week. Not only because they have decided to release a very depressing game, but they have chosen to release two games next week. The two releases onto the Epic Games store next week will be Digital Sun’s Moonlighter, and 11 Bit Studios’ This War of Mine. Luckily for you, if you are unsure about This War of Mine David has already written a review for it here.

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