Limbus Company is a free-to-play, live-service, gacha game, and if your alarm bells are ringing right now, I don't blame you. These are all things that set my alarms off too, but Limbus Company manages to break those trends, and emerges as an enjoyable, genuinely free-to-play friendly game. You take on the role of Dante, a person with a clock for a head, managing the 12 playable characters of the game, the sinners, accompanied by Vergillius and Charon.

Limbus Company can be split up into a couple of sections, the first being the visual novel. The games story, which is well worth experiencing, is told through a classic visual novel style with absolutely gorgeous art, absolute stand out moments and some of the best story telling you'll find, not just in gacha games but in video games as a whole.

The story is structured with what it calls Cantos and Intervallos. Cantos are main story chapters that focus around a specific Sinners story. Each Sinner and their canto is based on another story or novel, but has a Project Moon flavoured twist, don't expect simple retellings, the latest Canto, Canto 6, for example, is focused on Heathcliff and is based on the story of Wuthering Heights. Intervallos are smaller bits of story set between each canto, serving as mid-season content for players to enjoy, these can't really be classified as filler, as they contain major plot points and progress the story in proper meaningful ways.

As of Canto 7, Limbus Company has one of the best stories I've ever had the pleasure of enjoying in any media, and I'm hugely looking forward to future content.

The second part of Limbus Company's gameplay is of course, the combat. Limbus Company uses a turn based system where you simply pick skills to use on enemies, taking advantage of a few systems such as Clashes, Passive skills, Resonance and such to overcome challenges, though basic on it's surface, it can get quite deep when building out your team to its max efficiency, with teams usually being built around specific status effects.

There are several gameplay 'modes' in Limbus Company.

The 1st is the regular 'unfocused' battles which are, for all intents and purposes, trash battles.
The 2nd is 'focused' encounters, these are more interesting, more in depth battles where you can precisely target your skills, and is the more enjoyable type of battle, in my opinion.

And the games content can be broken down as such:
Main Story: this is the main story where you go through a linear progression of content to experience the story of the game, obviously.
Mirror Dungeon - aka the Mines: this is, as I'll go into later, you'll spend time farming if you wish to farm Battle Pass levels. Mirror Dungeon has both a regular and hard mode, with the hard mode being something you only do once per week.
Refraction Railway: this is your end-game content, which gives you a tonne of rewards and some unique items for beating it before the next season comes out, and under a certain number of turns.

Progression wise, for a gacha game, Limbus Company is refreshing in its simplicity, it doesn't have the obnoxious amount of different materials you'll find in other games, every identity is upgraded with a total of 3 resources - experience, threads, and the characters specific shards. E.G.O skills are the same, but don't have experience. My only advice here would be, in general, to get any identity you're using to Uptie 3 to unlock it's final skill to make proper use of it. Some identities massively benefit from getting them to Uptie 4 too, but these are exceptions.

While Limbus Company is a gacha game, it is barely a gacha game. While yes there is indeed a gacha, and a cash shop, which you can indeed spend a lot of money on if you wish, you really don't need to, and I don't mean this in the "Well you can beat the game with basic stuff" sense. Project Moon are extremely generous with free premium currency, from in-game weekly bonuses, first time clears of content, and tonnes from maintenance and bug fix compensation, this alone lets you get a bunch of free rolls on the gacha, but there's something even better and even more efficient you can spend lunacy on.

By spending lunacy on Enkephalin Refreshes (stamina), you can farm more runs of Mirror Dungeons, which gives you more battle pass levels, which can be infinitely levelled, and once you get max on the regular tracks, it starts giving you egoshard crates every extra level you get. By buying the games battle pass premium path, you get even more of these crates per Mirror Dungeon run, increasing to 9 from 3, each of these crates can be turned into character shards, averaging at 2 shards per crate, to 6 (or 18) per run of MD you done. Also, as a side note here, unlike other games, Limbus Company's battle pass is not monthly, but rather seasonal. As an example, last season ran from March 28th and won't October 10th.

These shards can then be spent in the in-game dispensary, which allows you to buy almost any identity and E.G.O skill in the game, costing 150 shards for a 00 Identity, and 400 for a 000 Identity or E.G.O. There are two exceptions to this.

The first exception is identities from the previous season in the game. For example - as of the time of the review (Jan. 2025) the game is on Season 5 - Oblivion. You can currently buy everything in the dispensary except for identities from Season 4. When Season 5 comes out, Season 4 identities will be back in the dispensary, and the Season 5 identities will be temporarily removed until Season 7 and so on.

The other is from the games quarterly(ish) Walpurgis Night event, which doesn't add its identities and E.G.O skills to the dispensary until the next run of the event.

To get an idea of just how generous this system is - I started the game in April of 2024, and as of today (14th Jan 2025) I have everything in the game, almost everything at Uptie/Threadspin 3, and several dozen identities at max level. I find this unprecedented in any gacha game I've ever tried.