I’ve played Limbus Company for 350+ hours, going back to summer 2023 (season 2). I think it’s just okay.

Paradise: the story

I don't know if you've heard, but Limbus has a pretty good story.

If your only exposure to human storytelling is other gacha games, you will think Limbus stole fire from the gods. The story revolves around a core group of lovable misfits who are characterized consistently over time, but also grow and change. They have quirks and running jokes, but nobody is ever reduced to just being a comedy sidekick. In fact, sometimes, when the characters are joking around a lot, it’s because they’re afraid of being vulnerable. Just like real people!

Limbus tackles mature psychological themes. Each “canto” is its own story, focused on a particular character, and generally speaking, each canto deals with that character’s past relationships with parental or authority figures, where those relationships were complicated, unhealthy, and/or outright abusive. In our own real lives, we all have to come to terms with similar relationships (even if our parents aren't mass murderers), so I’m not surprised that the story resonates deeply with a lot of players.

Limbus has an original world that’s been developed across multiple games and other media. The City is a brutal, sprawling dystopia, full of different factions struggling to survive. You have petty squabbles between ragtag groups of street gangsters, and you have massively destructive wars between corporations with the resources to buy supernatural power. There’s a huge amount of variety among the factions, but they all feel like part of the City.

All this said, for me personally, the story is maybe…a 7 out of 10. It’s good, but it’s not an all-time favorite. I think I've just alienated everyone, but let me try to explain, starting with the points that I think more people will agree with.

The pacing of the story is negatively affected by the need to spread it out over many chapters with combat sprinkled in. They’ve gotten better about this over time (canto 4 was probably the low point), but even today, it sometimes feels like there are a bunch of fights against filler mooks randomly inserted into a visual novel. This was especially egregious in the most recent intervallo (side story) — Gregor is getting important character development but oh no it’s been too long without combat, uhhhh suddenly there are angry artists in this hallway, go fight them! I know this is very normal for video games, but it still annoys me.

Limbus avoids the usual gacha problem where old characters get thrown by the wayside as they try to sell you new ones, although they do have a weird cousin of that problem where every canto has a lot of distinct minor antagonists, so they can make IDs that are parallel-universe versions of our characters as those antagonists. Also, over time, they've built up a substantial roster of recurring side characters, and I just don’t care about all of them equally. My favorite parts of the Limbus story are the interactions between the core cast, and I've found the number of NPCs running around in the last two cantos a little overwhelming. In Ryoshu's canto, for instance, I could have used a little more Ryoshu and a little less of the Yellow Harpoon and the Distortion Detective gang.

One last point, and this one might just be me as the only Limbus fan in existence who reads (the forbidden combo). The main characters in Limbus are all based on literary characters, but I don't think they all do justice to their source material. Limbus really likes to tell stories about trauma from problematic family or family-like relationships, ending in the message that it's important to embrace hope, reject despair, and be true to yourself. Demian and Wuthering Heights work with this formula, because Demian actually is about being true to yourself and Wuthering Heights actually is about family trauma and despair, but not every piece of source material fits in the square hole. Limbus Ishmael has a completely different personality from Moby-Dick Ishmael. In her canto, we get the Wishbone version of the Moby-Dick story: Ahab is crazy and obsessed with vengeance, and it turns out That’s Bad. Also, there are pirates with names from Peter Pan, because pirates also sail I guess? I get that they’re not trying to do a 1:1 adaptation of Moby-Dick, but I feel like they left a lot of meat on the bone in favor of hitting the generic beats of a nautical adventure story. The Jeroboam would be so good in Limbus, come on! And any version of Moby-Dick ending with "they actually kill the whale" is kind of nuts...

...but stepping back, it speaks highly of Limbus that I want to analyze it like this. It's not just “good for a mobile game story,” it’s sitting at the big kids’ table with good narrative games, movies, novels, etc. It's not at the head of the table, but it is at the table.

Purgatory: the grind

What do you actually do in Limbus? 5-10 hours of story every few months, and then dailies, dailies, weeklies, and weeklies.

People like to say that Limbus is a gacha game made by people who didn't know how to make a gacha game, implying they are accidentally too player-friendly for their own good. There are definitely worse games out there, but is Limbus "player-friendly"? It depends how you value your time.

I have 350+ hours in the game, and I’ve bought the battle pass every season since season 2, plus some extra lunacy for pulls, and I am still not close to having everything. (To be fair, this is partly by choice: I think I'll survive without Chef Gregor.) I am really nowhere close to having the resources to level and upgrade all my IDs. I recently came back from a couple months’ break, and it was a struggle to scrounge enough XP to level more than one team to the new cap, even after emptying the shop for two events. You have to be consistent with the daily grind over the course of years to keep up with XP and thread. While you can buy any ID or EGO (weapon) you want by grinding the roguelike mode for battle pass levels…that’s still 5-6 hours of grinding per ID if you’re very optimal, three times that if you're on the free battle pass, and then even more for the shards to upgrade them. For context, there are over 200 IDs and EGO in the game, without counting the lower-rarity 00 IDs or base forms.

Heaven help you if you’re a new player. You’re going to have to schlep through the main story with whatever you get from your first few pulls, and what you pull might not be very good: because the power level of the game has gradually increased over time, most of those 200 IDs and EGO are subpar on more recent content. Also, you can’t outright buy any of the IDs from the immediately previous season, or any of the powerful Walpurgis-limited IDs unless there's an active Walpurgis event (which happens every few months). Also, it’s going to be extremely painful for you to grind the battle pass until you get caught up on the main story, at which point you can clear 22 levels of the battle pass with one weekly completion of the roguelike mode. Also, when you do get there, you’re going to want to have multiple teams to rotate for the roguelike mode, or you won’t get the currency to buy the bonuses that make it easier to grind…

When most people say they hate gacha, they mean not being able to get all the characters, but personally, I can live with not having everything ever. What I hate is the grind and retention bullshit, and that is absolutely still present in Limbus. Expect to spend dozens or hundreds of hours grinding if you want to have multiple teams prepped for difficult content — and this is going to be really mindless grinding where you hit “winrate” every thirty seconds. There isn't even a full auto mode! You, my dear fellow manager, have to personally hit "P" and then "enter" every thirty seconds.

On the bright side, they finally added a boss battle challenge mode after three years! Between that and the railway, at least we can have fun playing with all these cool characters we built, right?

Hell: the core gameplay mechanics

I have spent hundreds of hours on a few games in my life, but I've never spent so much time on a game where the core mechanics are so fundamentally fucked.

I am not the first to observe that the “sanity” mechanic in Limbus is a disaster. In 95% of combat encounters in Limbus, you are trying to win “clashes” against enemy skills, which you do by having your skill roll higher than their skill. Sanity determines how likely you are to roll high. If you win a clash, your attack resolves and theirs doesn’t, and you gain sanity, making you more likely to roll high in the future, winning more clashes and gaining more sanity. Winning clashes for the first couple turns is critical to start this snowball effect. The best advice I can give you against the most difficult bosses in the game is:

1. Get IDs that clash well.
2. Grind XP to level your IDs so they clash better.
3. If you lose more than one or two clashes in the first two turns, smash that restart button.

The devs have tried to spice things up in a few different ways over the years, resulting in a few genuinely interesting boss designs. I really liked the knight from the Arknights collab event, although I might have liked him less if I didn't have a sinking team. These days, they've started giving enemies "unbreakable" attacks that hit you anyway when you win the clash, just for less damage, which means…you still really want to win clashes, but sometimes your IDs will die anyway, so now you need to prep more IDs so you have backups ready.

The devs clearly put a lot of love into the design of IDs, giving them insanely complex abilities and multiple pages of text, but this complexity doesn’t always translate into depth. You have limited control over your IDs — each turn you can pick one of two randomly-chosen abilities, a defense skill, or an EGO if you have resources. Sometimes you will want to understand all your options in depth, to manipulate special abilities or status effects in detail. But most of the time, you’re just going to pick whatever makes you likely to win as many clashes as you can, and use EGO as a panic button. Most of the time, the specifics of the myriad little bonuses and status effects matter less than the raw numbers.

Like I said, there are exceptions. I had a lot of fun using pre-nerf Talisman Sinclair to cheese out insanely fast boss kills, and there are still some extremely clever niche strategies if your account is set up right to use them (shoutout to teamkilling everyone with Fell Bullet Yi Sang). Many newer IDs like Mao Faust and Jeong Ishmael require a little micromanagement, so you can't just hit winrate if you want to get the most out of them. But in practice, I find that genuinely interesting decisions are few and far between...and in practice, the more you try to get cute with a creative team composition, the more you'll need to make sweet love to the restart button until the stars align on your rolls.

It sucks, man. I love turn-based combat and I want to love the crazy kits the devs cook up, but so much of the gameplay is dominated by obvious decisions and frustrating all-or-nothing mechanics where the best strategy is “retry until you get lucky on the important rolls.” There is fun hiding in there, but there are so many other games that do turn-based combat so much better, where I don’t feel like I'm fighting against the game to do cool stuff.

tl;dr

In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood

Story good, grind unpleasant but YMMV, gameplay bad.