The developers at Playdead, the team behind the hauntingly brilliant Xbox Live Arcade hit Limbo, really wanted to get their hands on a human skull, and after the surprisingly lengthy reviews process required to secure a human skull in Denmark, the devs finally got one. Why a skull, you ask? To test sound for their new game, of course.

Playdead CEO and co-founder Dino Patti told me this weekend during IndieCade 2010 that not only are the devs hard at work on a follow up to their downloadable masterpiece, which Patti suggested will most assuredly appeal to Limbo fans, but they are doing some rather elaborate experiments with sound for it as well.

Limbo has some of the most effective audio you’re likely to come across, which is doubly impressive when you consider the game’s sound designer, Martin Stig Andersen, had never designed audio for a game before his work on Limbo. As further validation of Andersen’s incredible work, Limbo won the award for best sound at IndieCade over the weekend.

For their next game, which Playdead isn’t talking much about just yet, the developers are looking to play with sound in a truly unique way, which is the reason they went through so much trouble to secure the human skull. You see, they’re using the skull to test how sounds register in different parts of the human head. For instance, think of the way your voice sounds to you versus the way it sounds when you listen to it on a recording. That's just one simple example, and it's already super compelling when put in the context of game design.

Limbo had a very “in your head” type of ambience to begin with, so to hear that the team is actually mapping out sounds inside an actual skull is delightful and a tad terrifying.

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