Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo

It’s a strange paradox that those that are closest to us oftentimes are the ones that hurt us the most. Sometimes being comfortable with someone will mean being too comfortable to say and do awful things to those we love. Dare I say that we can be casually cruel in the name of being honest, even? In the worst of scenarios, we allow resentment and damaged relationships to sit and stew until they’ve fermented well beyond the grave. In the case of Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo, it takes Bright Souls to unravel years of pain to allow folks to lay their souls to rest.

Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo tackles these themes of unresolved familial issues head-on in an afterlife set inside a colourful cardboard diorama. It feels a bit jarring at first. The game does not pull its punches when it comes to all varieties of trauma, with characters that have perpetual smiles on their faces. But the dissonance quickly fades away within the first two chapters. It’s easy to shrug your shoulders and point your fingers to call foul, but by the end of the game, I found that the art direction best illustrates the back-and-forth, bittersweet process of healing. Not everything is sunshine and rainbows, and the game takes the player to some creatively portrayed dark and desolate places. The Paper Mario-inspired look is a marvel to watch as you play through Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo. More impressive to me is where the game varies visually from its inspirations. There’s a temptation to compare it to Coco, a movie that depicts Latin American culture and how it envisions the afterlife, but the reality is that characters and plot events in Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo are entirely unique in both personality and appearance.

Playing as the titular Kulebra, you are a skeletal snake with bright blue flaming eyes. You are summoned, or brought forth somehow from somewhere, to the afterlife with the goal to help lost souls find closure and move on. This is the game’s primary mystery which will culminate in the finale. You aren’t really sure who you are or why a random old lady has tasked you with this responsibility. In fact, you don’t learn your own name until you’re deep into chapter 2. Admittedly, this wasn’t the most engaging narrative hook because Kulebra is a striking character that invites interest but is left aside for the majority of the game. After spending time in the first area, Dead Valley, meeting the characters who reside there and piecing their story together was more gratifying. Flora and Rosa are a mother and daughter who are planning on moving to the Plaza, a safe place for lost souls. As you speak with them, you uncover the pressure points in their relationship, stressed by the sudden disappearance of Rosa’s husband and Flora’s father. The game’s writing presents characters in a charmingly organic and comedic style and shifts between light-hearted wordplay and sober confessions well. Kulebra is more or less a blank slate with which Flora and Rosa, and then later NPCs, can voice the thoughts they are unwilling to share between themselves. Eventually, Kulebra will draw out the darkness that plagues the key instigator in each of these tense familial relationships to bring closure to everyone involved.

As the game snowballs toward its finale, it trips up the baton pass from the smaller, one-off stories to the grander narrative arc. Kulebra’s mystery tends to idle in short cutscenes in which an unnamed hawk asks if Kulebra assisting souls and doing good deeds is the right thing to do. This villain fails to stir any profound conversation on morally grey decisions in the game without any real input from the player or Kulebra. There’s a small discussion on whether or not doing good deeds is truly altruistic, but it remains undeveloped for too much of the game’s story. In the game’s final chapter, NPCs will address this mystery laterally, without giving a straight answer until the end. The story really excels with the characters and helping them open up about their issues. The game’s end has a remarkable cutscene with one of the key spirits that you help, which I won’t spoil here but want to mention because it connects a loose end into the finale seamlessly. So while the pacing seems off, Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo does do justice to the majority of the main spirits you meet as it concludes. I found the very end of the game surprising, and I am curious to see where most people land on it. It’s got a resolution, even if not everything you hope to see played out gets entirely resolved.

Mechanically, the game is more than the sum of its parts. There’s not much that you do as a player, yet Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo make excellent use of your small toolkit. Kulebra spends most of his time speaking with NPCs and fetching items for them. Movement, a boosted slam, lighting a match, and clicking through conversations are your key abilities that are used to work through both each hub and puzzles inside mini-dungeon-like places. In contained locations, the game’s design draws from Resident Evil in an unexpected but appropriately engaging way. Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo smartly adapts Resident Evil’s structure in non-combat encounters. I wandered through several locations looking for specific keys and puzzling to use them correctly to open locks. There are unbeatable spirits who follow you until you complete a task too. I spent more time than expected finding hiding places to make it through stealth sections or worm my way through shifting passages. Bosses mark the end of each chapter, but given the game’s lack of a combat system, instead you are put to the test, literally. Boss encounters function more like interviews in which they quiz Kulebra about the characters he’s interacted with. Answer incorrectly, and a Darkness meter percentage will rise. If that hits 100%, it’s a “Lights Out”, and you’ll restart the game from the nearest save point, which is frequently distributed throughout the adventure. To complicate things, because these are open-note tests in which you have access to your automatically compiled notebook, bosses will ask trick questions in which none of the answers are correct. You’ll have to “refute” the question to lower the darkness meter and continue. Overall, they felt like the right game design to fit a largely detective narrative story structure.

The core of Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo is easily recognisable, as it wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s right to be kind. The final chapter pushes beyond this truism towards a thought-provoking discussion on when it’s okay to retire from duty and how, by throwing your life into your work, you may end up doing more harm than good. It leaves a lot to consider, even if the path there has its stumbling blocks.