At this point, having reviewed so many indie games on Switch ranging from those at the top of the pile to the bottom, I’ve begun to better understand the bar I’ve set for games reaching higher scores. Granted, one of the reasons there aren’t so many games scoring a 9 and above is tied to the indie games I generally review, many of which are very niche in some way. While others can disagree, in my mind without being able to appeal at least somewhat to a larger crowd there’s only so high that a game’s score can go. They don’t have to have universal appeal, but they need to be so good that they’re capable of attracting attention outside of their typical pool. For me it’s only at that point, where they are able to break away from merely being great within their own space, that games can cross that threshold. In my mind, Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo deserves to be counted in that more uncommon space.

In the game you’ll play as Kulebra, a soul who has passed to the afterlife but who arrives in Limbo and seems to be blessed with a greater purpose. It turns out that because of the purity of your spirit you’ll be able to help other souls who have become trapped, unable to move on. What follows is an adventure that will have you meeting up with many such souls, getting to understand what their challenges are, and then generally working to help them move on. Mechanically this tends to work quite sensibly by your typical adventure game standards. It isn’t as if it’s all easy. You’ll still need to explore, be observant, and put clues together, but I didn’t often trip over the typical speed bumps most adventure games have either, which was refreshing. Where it gets pretty wild is that you’ll even periodically run into the equivalent of boss fights, which was a great surprise and handled very well within the context of the game’s play style.

What really takes this adventure to that next level though is its degree of heart, and often how touching the stories of the souls you’re trying to help tend to be. Rather than being one-dimensional, predictable, or cliche in some way, there’s typically a depth to their stories that’s very much appreciated. There’s just an authenticity to the pain some of these souls feel that struck me as uncommon, and the effort it took to help create that depth on the part of the developers is worthy of recognition and some praise.

So what that leaves you with is an adventure that works well, and has some unusual elements like boss fights, matched up with storytelling that’s also exceptional. While there are quite a number of good indie games out there that have done either one of those two things well, it’s more unusual to see a game that manages to pull off both feats with flying colors. For me, that helps to distinguish Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo among its competition, and raises it to more rarified air in recognition of the effort put into creating it.