Limbo: An XBox 360 Arcade Exclusive at E3

Imagine that Tim Burton and Edward Gorey teamed up, setting out to kill an adorable little boy in astounding, disturbing, fascinating ways. Welcome to Limbo, a game produced by Play Dead Games.

Already nominated by Kotaku as Best of E3, Limbo is like nothing else we saw this week. There is no tutorial. No heads-up display. No cutscenes, no load times, no speech. And this is a good thing.

The story is told entirely through gameplay, a simple, sweetly eerie tale. A little boy, known only as The Boy, has somehow lost his sister and must traverse the dangers of the Limbo between heaven and hell to save her.

Boy is a tiny, stylized little hero, only emoting through two bright little eyes. Watching those two lights go out is a little bit gut-wrenching, but you'd better get used to it."You will die often," said Jeppe Carlsen, game and level designer, "But you should be able to learn from it." Get ready to die.

The game has a ton of checkpoints built in, so dying isn't a penalty, it's a mechanic. You won't have to go back far to recover, and you'll always pick up a new trick with experience.

The game is almost entirely black and white, with occasional tints of a faint blue or a warmer wash of beige over the gray.  Fog and mist rise and hide obstacles, or sometimes the darkness falls and forces our focus to the next puzzle. Ominous, stark, eerie, fascinating, Limbo is an X-Box 360 exclusive and one you definitely need to see..