This allows you to pick up said can, place it across the room, and it instantly becomes a much greater size, perhaps creating the platform you need to advance. Anything that can be interacted with can be done so from any distance. Early on you can pick up a can of soda, or a chess piece, observe them as their natural size, but depending on how you maneuver, you can change their size. Though the game’s 1-2 hour story does alter its central mechanic more than some games like it, the unifying theme is perspective. Quickly, the player seems to go off the intended path within this dream state and these rooms players explore become catalysts for some of gaming’s greatest “aha!” moments. Voiceovers from an AI and tapes played back from the lead doctor guide players room by mind-bending room with a similar British wit as the grandparent of the genre has. Superliminal begins in a dream world where the player is the focus of a sleep study. These descendents are often compared in a simple phrase – “Portal, but with colors,” “Portal, but serious,” “Portal, but with time travel.” In its brevity, Pillow Castle Games’ Superliminal earns an unexpected caveat: Portal, but better. Many of Superliminal’s puzzles offer clever solutions, but I was occasionally stuck in an obtuse situation that left me scratching my head even after I’d stumbled through the solution.Ever since Valve created Portal, other first-person puzzlers featuring a novel central mechanic and a room-by-room difficulty ramp have unavoidably been linked to the timeless game. I ultimately solved this puzzle by touching a certain object each time I passed by, but the game never communicates why I had to do this or how that allowed me to progress. Every time I tried to leave the area I found myself reenter the same space. At one point, I got stuck in a looped hallway. These moments are neat, but they can also be disorienting, like when you walk through a doorway and suddenly find yourself falling through the floor.Įxploring Superliminal’s illogical spaces is novel, unfortunately, it also leads to one of the game’s biggest flaws: it is sometimes hard to know what the game is demanding of the player. Some of Superliminal’s levels aren’t puzzles as much as they are interactive optical illusions and the environment will shift and warp as you move. For example, at one point I reached for a box only to watch it disintegrate in my hands. However, things are rarely what they seem, and developer Pillow Castle constantly plays with your expectations. This perspective manipulation mechanic is really neat and I had fun shrinking big objects down so they could fit through tiny holes and enlarging small wedges of cheese to create ramps up to second-story doors.Īs Superliminal progresses, its puzzles naturally evolve. This works both ways, and I got a real thrill out of plucking giant houses off the horizon to shrink them down so I could set them on a table as if they were a doll’s accessory. In Superliminal, you can use this to your advantage, so when you hold small objects up close they actually do become larger. For example, if you hold an apple close to your face it looks bigger than it actually is. One of its strongest gimmicks is how it allows you to use your perspective to manipulate objects. Superliminal is a first-person puzzler that plays with forced perspectives. Unfortunately, using dream logic to solve real puzzles also provides its fair share of frustrations. Impressively, it evokes many of the emotions we have while we sleep. Superliminal is a puzzle game that attempts to explore those feelings and the fuzzy logic that only exists inside our dreams. Our dreams are often thrilling, arresting, and terrifying – sometimes they are all three at once.
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