Putting a pin in this one for now because I'm honestly just not enjoying it at all.

Going straight from Lobotomy Corp and Library Of Ruina to this might be the biggest downgrade I've ever seen.

Limbus Company feels like a demented theme park version of Project Moon's setting. LoR was a funny game when it wanted to be but there was a nice blend of humor and actual dialogue. The jokes flowed naturally, but here... I never thought I'd accuse a game of being too funny, yet here I am.
I don't inherently think the idea of "slightly more lighthearted LoR" is a bad thing, especially since the last two games were BLEAK despite their hopeful mission statements, but in making this a gacha game and thus trying to give it mainstream appeal, I feel a lot of the edge has been sanded off. LoR's city is this grimy, nightmarish place that wears the veneer of a functional place but in reality is basically a series of holding pens for a city-state that practices systemic human sacrifice. In simpler terms, a slaughterhouse.
But Limbus is so obnoxiously clean and civil. Even the nastier parts of the backstreets look like they'd be positively scenic in Cyberpunk 2077.

It seeps into the characters too. Not to harp on the LoR comparisons too much, but it's a bit weird going from a game where your two leads are suffocatingly and hauntingly human to a game where characters' "flaws" are very... Battle shonen.
I sort of knew I'd be in for a bad time when I exited my self-imposed Library of Ruina isolation bubble and realized the fanbase had turned Limbus characters into these funny whacky woohoo people that wouldn't be out of place in a Mihoyo game.
I've been told that there are better moments in later Cantos, 5 and 6 especially, but I'm halfway through Canto 3 and I just can't stand these people dude. Hokma is a more engaging character and half of his dialogue in Ruina is "shut the fuck up, good god".
They're not explicitly bad characters but in a setting where even a lot of single-appearance characters are infinitely memorable and have enough character to write a thesis on, I'm actually a little appalled that the Limbus cast are so boring. When they're not boring, they're at best 'fun.

I think, and this might be me being very ornery, a lot of the boredom I feel re: Limbus' cast is from how obvious and controlling the literary influences are. Meursault is a stoic man who only speaks when it's important? Don Quixote is a delusional nutjob? Heathcliff is a roughcast byronic lad? Sinclair is a sad little man that needs an older figure to guide him? Gregor is a bug? Dante is there and being guided through the suspiciously circular City by Vergilius?
It's childish, and I really hate to say that because Project Moon's work tends to be distinctly adult in a way that I often don't associate with the medium of videogames (not due to the medium's fault ofc), and Limbus is so very much divorced from what makes their games great in spirit.
I'm aware that later Cantos allegedly deconstruct their patron Sinner's source material, but...

In the middle of writing this I decided to read up on the story and proceedings of the subsequent Cantos, and while my initial indicator was Shelved I think I'm gonna switch over to Abandoned. To say I'm not very enthused is an understatement, and while a certain facet of Canto 6 had my lean forward in my chair it probably says a lot that I only cared because it was a continuation of a work that isn't this one.

According to Project Moon this is the money vacuum they need to make to fund future games, so I can only hope that maybe that Distortion Detective game has more of their signature sauce, because this is Big Mac sauce and I can get that elsewhere.

As an aside: It is darkly hilarious that this is a followup to two games where the core conceit is "Capitalism really fucking sucks and makes everything worse". If Limbus being mid is diegetic, Project Moon really are the greatest of our time.

...Also the combat is bad. It looks nicer than Ruina on a technical level and the return of familiar sfx is nice on the ears, but ONCE AGAIN; as a gacha, it's massively toned down and there's no deckbuilding or passive swapping or any of the mechanics that caused Ruina to hook its claws into me and start injecting raw joy straight into my faggy little veins.
LoR allegedly once had autobattle combat in the original stages of its development and I am so fantastically glad that they never went through with it because if Limbus is a window into that reality then I'm closing the fucking curtains.
Most fights barring abnormalities/bosses are fought by drawing lines through coins to trigger effects and start combat and god it's just so mindnumbingly boring that I'd actually pay money for them to release this as a visual novel. The other type of battle is essentially diet LoR but with the ability to target boss fights. It'd be fun in a better game which is probably all I need to say to make my malice known.

Really, if you want to experience this game you'd be better off grabbing some .epub files of the books it rips from and digging into them. They're called classics for a reason, folks.

Oh and uh, the gacha elements are fine I guess? There's a permanent currency you can stockpile to trade for whatever Identity/EGO you want, which gives it an edge over the competition, but good gacha elements in a mediocre game are meaningless to me. It also has the usual live service crust one expects from these games (a battle pass, endless monthly/weekly mtx discounts, a really annoying file integrity check at startup, Seasons, etc etc) and doesn't really do anything cool within its confines either.

Shoutout to Heathmael Abortion.

Echoing the thoughts of some people here, I wish indeed this was a normal game. The game -- and the series, really, has a great foundation in its lore where the weird becomes commonplace and the weird is lethal. Oftentimes you might ask why the City operates in this way, but the game often does not explain it to its surprising benefit.

This is no different in Limbus, though given that you're actually managing a bunch of low-tier misfits now with little experience compared to a washed up Fixer in the previous game, things that seemed incredibly easy to the previous game's characters are lorewise pretty tough here.

I will say outright that I ditched the game during the tutorial due to some amount of confusion and dislike of the presentation of the game.

You start out with a system where you have to line up actions and they will carry out those actions seamlessly. Compared to the previous game's manually assigning which Dice would clash with another enemy's dice, this is much, much quicker to execute. Unfortunately, it seems that it in effect has made it much harder for you to view who's clashing with what, not helped by the standard gacha tutorials restricting the actions you can carry out

Further exacerbating the issue is that if you're playing on the phone, some important icons are stacked on top of icons, making it hard to see, and the game is reliant on being able to perceive colors in order to see which sin types are resonating with which action you're performing.

The game also requires multiple keypresses in order to view a character's skillset, having to do it one by one per character if you want to see what your team member does.

All in all, this does not make for a good first impression and an unpleasant experience, which is a shame because the plot is great here; Dante (the Main Character) is a defined 'loser' that has to earn the trust of the people under his command, and the City still remains as oppressive as ever.

Will I pick it up and deal with it? Maybe; not likely, even if someone told me if I did the same on the Rats in the previous game (no, I didn't; but I did use a mod that gave me 99 copies of a page after burning a book), but I think it's too much an ask if the official game can't even provide tutorials (in normal Project Moon style) instead with people referring newcomers to a certain youtube channel's guides (which to be fair does not go too in-depth to the point it can't be understood by newcomers) in order to understand the basics.

Also, the phone version... just works(tm). It was fantastic that after I tabbed out, the game just froze and won't respond. I think I see why people recommend playing this on the PC, what with its miniscule UI being suited for bigger screens, and... that.

But I don't like playing gacha games of any form on the PC. And it's still a bit too much to ask people to wade through confusing content before they arrive at something peak, though I have no doubt that Project Moon can, and has already gotten to that point.

Project Moon's attempt at simultaneously cashing in the goodwill they built up with their two previous masterpieces by making a (fucking) gacha game while also trying to maintain their reputation by making the game less greedy than other gacha games while maintaining their high-quality storytelling. The result is a game that's ludonarratively much weaker than its predecessors and, uh, has bullshit like energy mechanics gating story progression behind real-time waits (unless you want to pay of course)... but still kinda justifies its existence by being a platform for Project Moon to create a long-form ongoing story set in its fantastic fictional universe.

The later cantos really do have great stories, but the game also suffers from a really horrible push and pull where they clearly want this to be a Real Video Game like the previous ones so there'll be bossfights that are actually challenging but that challenge ends up feeling completely hollow compared to previous games as unlocking/leveling up new IDs/EGO to try out new strategies on hard fights is locked behind f2p/gacha bullshit.

Unfortunately I can't stop playing because the story really is that good.

It's a Gacha game with energy mechanics to prevent you from playing at a certain point. It does look fair compared to those REALLY SCUMMY Gacha games by having a good battle pass, unlike whatever the fuck the likes of Genshin or Star Rail tell you a battle pass is, the pity system existing and being okay-ish, and the game giving you plenty of currency to pull with. It's still absolutely a fucking gambling simulator, so it's not going to get any points for that, but still, it COULD be worse.

The gameplay is frankly terrible, the only real gameplay is team building, so again gambling for the good characters and the good attacks, then picking your team based on the foes' weaknesses/strengths, followed by using your energy to farm EXP tickets to raise their levels, followed by actual gameplay which begins with an invisible dice roll deciding the speed of the characters followed by every single action being a dice roll to see if you succeed. Do you see the problem? You can theoretically have a perfect lineup for the enemies ahead and still fail due to dice rolls.

The ONLY reason this game should ever be considered by you is the story, which seemed so far so good to the end of Kanto 3 which is where I gave up out of boredom. The characters, the setting, and the art that brings those to life are all top-notch. The game is also fully voice-acted which is not a thing every gacha or even a normal game has, which took me by surprise. This is the only thing that strung me along and I'm going to work my way backward thought Studio Moon's catalog to find more about this world, but Limbus Company is a certified stinker.