I really enjoyed them, but I wouldn't say there's any replayablility there. I enjoy the dark atmosphere and a lot of the fun for me was just the discovery and seeing what sort of creepy stuff coming next. Once the games were finished I didn't feel the urge to play them again.
Limbo is the archetypal "scared little guy in big scary world dark artsy platform-puzzle indy game". Personally I found it overrated. Nice enough art style, but nothing of substance - extremely basic gameplay, no plot. Just a series of scary monsters killing you until you trial-and-error your way to the next section.
Both look really cool, but I am really not a big platformer guy so I'm unsure. Inside is 90% off on GOG though so might pick it up for a dollar and a half. Limbo is full price and even though it's just $10 I don't know that I'd like it enough. How hard is the platforming and the puzzles?
GOG and itch’s approach to preservation is always gonna be limited by legality, you can’t keep a game on your platform if the publisher requests its delisting; ofc piracy isn’t constrained by this, so it’s inherently better at preservation
at least, since the games on there don’t have DRM, once you have them you keep them (and with GOG, you can also download offline installers that you can reuse on any computer you want). they make piracy (and therefore preservation) way easier in that way, because pirates don’t even need to repack the game!
What about the next generation of kids that want to play old classics, or just plain ol patient gamers that never got to it? If it's just people that have private personal backups, then it'll eventually die with them and be lost forever to time.
GoG is very much about the marketing of game preservation. That said, to my knowledge, they (like Steam) don't remove it from your account. Just from the store. So if you bought it, you can still play it.
GoG is a bit better in that their DRM model only requires you to authenticate to download, not reinstall. So you can theoretically archive all of your purchases if you have way more storage than you should. But it also is horrible at surfacing when an installer has an update so... mostly this is only viable for truly dead games.
I like GoG a lot as a platform but it has always rubbed me wrong that they pretend they are focused on game preservation. But that also might be because I am old enough to remember The French Monk incident.
Lol, should they just keep the games up? See if any blood hungry lawyers notice? (Piracy is probably the best way to preserve though, I will agree on that.)