by I would never want to live in The City – a dystopian megalopolis at the heart of Korean indie Project Moon’s Games, comics AND themed cafe— but it’s a fascinating place to visit. That’s what I was coming out of Limbus company, the studio’s third game and the first not exclusive to Steam. This ambitious RPG is also available on mobile devices. And free. And supported by gacha mechanics. And yes, I was worried about it as much as you.
After spending about thirty hours at Limbus (and not feeling the need to spend any money on it), I am relieved to say that it is an excellent successor The Lobotomy Company AND Ruin Library. It’s dark, bloody, and heavy in dialogue and drama. It’s also challenging, complex, and rewarding for players who want to sit back and untangle the often confusing web of combat mechanics. It’s as hardcore as mobile RPGs and much closer to its PC predecessors than its newer peers.
For total newcomers to the world of Project Moon, Limbus Company is equal parts visual novel and turn-based RPG, a sequel to two other games but mechanically and narratively completely separate. In Limbus Company, an amnesiac watchmaker named Dante (you) leads a pack of twelve immortal “Sinners” (a mismatched mix of eccentrics, each loosely based on a piece of classical literature or its author) on a quest to retrieve a series of techno-magic macguffins from abandoned abandoned corporate “dungeons” beneath a dystopian cyberpunk megacity. You also operate from a carnivorous bus called Mephistopheles, which must be fed live human flesh on a regular basis. So a normal corporate concert.
If that sounds like a lot to take, expect to get dizzy when you get to the fight. For those familiar with the extremely complex deckbuilding battles of Library Of Ruina, many of its concepts are familiar, if somewhat simplistic. Newcomers will have to juggle a chaotic web of damage types, initiative and damage rolls, a slew of status effects, buffs and debuffs, and seven consumables used to fuel limit-style “EGO” attacks. In a single combat round, dozens of combatants can sometimes clash with each other, with only the taller attacker able to deal direct damage.
It’s a tense and unpredictable fight, but there’s real strategy and tactics involved. Having twelve characters from the start – each with their own attacks and damage resistances – means team composition matters more than raw levels and stats, and you can currently field up to five characters. It’s not uncommon to switch party members on a regular basis, especially in the dungeons that make up the back half of each of the (currently three) story chapters, where damage and casualties persist between battles. A Pyrrhic victory is entirely possible when it is advisable to go back to the last save point. Potentially frustrating, but I enjoyed the challenge it presented.
While many mobile RPGs feel like nothing more than a skinner’s box asking you to collect attractive anime characters and dance them through a threadbare story, almost everything here seems to serve Limbus Company’s narrative. It’s a densely written (and expertly translated) story with deep literary allusions and a tone that oscillates from frenetic comedy (chapter two had a few laugh moments for me) to unsettling horror. Anime fan site it’s not either, with its cast in the slightest unsexual, and its gacha systems relegated solely to fighting to ensure minimal dissonance between your Ludos and your narratives.
Multiverse of woes
A real effort seems to have been made to avoid the common pitfalls of exploitation.
The Elephant in the Room is how the sequel to a pair of indie retail games could go the free mobile route. The answer is quite familiar at first glance – in-box currencies, unlockable random rolls, and a quarterly battle pass – but it feels like real effort has been made to avoid common pitfalls of exploitation. Instead of randomly rolling new characters, you draw alternate timeline versions of your twelve Sinners from the gacha pool with their own pros and cons. These alternate versions tend to be more specialized and quirky, allowing for more creative team building, but the default versions you start the game with can still get you through the campaign as it stands.
Being a self-published game from a small studio, don’t expect a technological tour-de-force from Limbus. I’ve been a fan of Project Moon since their first game, but not since the next miHoYo. That said, I adore the aesthetic of this game, leaning on the slightly rough styles of webcomics, with broad brushstrokes on everything from backgrounds to dialogue art panels and even animated-style combat sprites. The battles also leave arenas littered with craters, wounds, and shattered corpses, adding a bit more energy to the fights. The whole game has a cohesive and evocative look, building on the style they created for Library Of Ruina without being overly complicated.
Where the game goes beyond that is sound. The entire story is well voiced (though only in Korean), with plenty of emotional performances. However, the music really shines; there are a few generic tracks used for dialogue, dungeon crawling, and main menus, but each of the current three chapters has six or more unique battle themes, and they’re all hits. Each chapter also ends with an ending theme sung by the main character, with the current final boss having Mili’s multi-phase vocal theme reflecting Ruina’s larger confrontations.
After just over thirty hours of play and no real money spent, I’ve now exhausted everything Limbus Company has to offer (besides its daily roguelike dungeons that boost XP) and had a blast doing it. Now the long wait for Project Moon begins their action plan (which seems to be headed for another three or four chapters by the end of the year) along with Mirror Dungeons upgrades. Some have announced major improvements to the combat engine to make defensive skills more profitable and the early game less difficult. This one is a very active work in progress and I can see it improving over time.
Seeing how much I enjoyed these first three chapters, and knowing Project Moon’s tendency to wildly escalate in their previous games, I’m excited and ready to go. New players to the City can start their tour with the Library Of Ruina to get acquainted with the slightly slower world and its complex combat.
