![]() ![]() I’m moving from segmented level to level trying to figure out what the game wants me to do, instead of having fun with everything that I’ve been shown is possible. This often makes Superliminal feel like Portal. You can’t make everything bigger or smaller, and there are doors every so often that block you from bringing your useful soda cans, exit signs, or chess pieces into the next level. The problem is that Superliminal isn’t a sandbox it’s a puzzle game. It feels like a magic trick, but one that I control. I spend my first hour or so with the game making boxes bigger and then smaller again while chuckling to myself. The key mechanicĮverything comes down to the idea of tampering with reality through the use of perspective, which is legitimately very neat. It sounds soothing, right up until it becomes clear that something, somewhere, has gone wrong, and I’m stuck inside a dream that very quickly begins to feel like a nightmare. I don’t know who I am, but I’m clearly here to test a program and learn something in the process. You see, I’m in a therapy session conducted via dreams. It’s not about what’s real, it’s about what looks real. ![]() Portraits, seen in the right way, can become doorways to another environment. I can pick it up as if it were a physical object, and now it’s in my hands. If I stand just right, the block looks real. Later, I find an orange block painted on the walls. ![]() This is the key mechanic of Superliminal. However, when I turn and place the soda at the end of the hall, I’ve played a clever trick I can now walk towards the soda can to find its grown to a massive size. When I hold the soda in my hands, it’s quite small. I stand in the hallway of a quiet medical facility, and grab a can of soda from a vending machine. Eventually, moving forward feels more like a matter of dumb luck than observational skills, taking some of the sense of accomplishment out of the game's sails.Superliminal is a puzzle game in which perception is reality. As the dreamscape begins to collapse in later scenes, scenes repeat or shift suddenly without explanation, or you fall into an abyss while making a mad dash for a door that apparently was never really there to start with. Even when you're doing everything right, the game has this nasty habit of making you question if you're actually on the right path. In fact, the biggest fault with Superliminal is that it just assumes you'll sort things out if left to your own devices, which would be fine if you had some sort of hint you were at least moving in the right direction. And then, right when you're at the end of your rope, you end up falling down an invisible hole that you never knew was there to being with. It's possible to find yourself trapped in one area for a substantial amount of time, frustrated by a lack of direction and no clue what you're supposed to be looking for. But as the game progresses, things are more confusing, and the solutions get more obscure. While things start off a bit on the trippy side, things at least make some kind of sense in the early stages. Superliminal is one of the most surreal mindbending experiences in gaming. Or maybe a model house on a table becomes big enough to walk through. As a result, a small sliver of cheese suddenly becomes a massive ramp. Picking up an object in your foreground and dropping it into the background keeps its size relative to how you saw it when you first picked it up. ![]() Size, shape, and everything else is all based around perspective. It forces players to look at everything from a new perspective, literally. That's the premise behind the first-person puzzler, Superliminal, a game where all the rules you think you know get tossed out the window. We all get lost in our own thoughts from time to time, but it's another thing entirely to be trapped in them. ![]()
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