Limbo is a puzzle-platform game by the Danish studio Playdead, released on Xbox Live Arcade in the summer of 2010 after three years of development, in which a boy crosses a monochrome, hostile world. Its audio, by the composer and sound designer Martin Stig Andersen, contains almost nothing that sounds like a conventional score.
Andersen studied electroacoustic composition at City University London and draws on acousmatic music and soundscape composition. He blended realistic and abstract sounds so that ambience and effects take over the role of music, in line with the director’s wish to avoid music that manipulates emotion. Sounds were passed through obsolete wire and tape recorders to give them the patina of a distant past, inspired partly by the soundtracks of old films, then smeared with spectral and convolution processing into hazy, reverberant textures. The result is a world heard from a distance, where near-silence matters as much as sound.