The revelation is somewhat sophomoric, but it nonetheless works because the player has experienced it themself. This explanation is framed as the point of the therapeutic treatment given to the player character. As the game ends, the doctor in charge of the simulation explains the need to find a unique perspective by stepping outside of oneself. The narrative of “Superliminal” focuses on the same thing the gameplay does: perspective and, specifically, the player character’s perspective. “Superliminal” is more concerned with variety, and keeping each puzzle simple, yet striking and memorable. ![]() Most puzzle games are interested in creating deep puzzles. “Superliminal” is so brief and so continuously creative with what it demands, while its puzzles remain easy to solve, that even if I was frustrated for a little bit, that frustration was quickly replaced by joy at the ingenuity and sheer visual spectacle of the solutions. That may sound negative, but it isn’t necessarily. The player either understands what they need to do, or they don’t. There is one correct action to solve the puzzle. The player must scale up the cheese by dragging it into a position where it looks large, so they can use it as a ramp to reach the button. One early puzzle involves a button, which needs to be pressed to open a door, placed on a ledge unreachable to the player and a small wedge of cheese. “Superliminal,” in contrast, is about fumbling blindly to find one correct action, like trying to fit a square peg into the appropriate hole while blindfolded. Most puzzle games demand that the player perform a complex series of interlocking tasks, drawn from a toolbelt of abilities the player has learned to appreciate. When I started “Superliminal,” I was expecting deep, intricate puzzles. Despite how unique it sounds, the game is actually really simplistic. The rest of the game follows the player as they try to escape the malfunctioning simulation solving increasingly bizarre and surreal perspective puzzles along the way. Very shortly into the game, something goes awry. This therapy is, in the game’s world, a sleep simulation. The player uses this to manipulate the world around them, solving a series of puzzles, all while voice-overs shepherd the player through the game’s narrative - an experimental therapy being given to the player character for some hinted at mental illness. An item that is dragged far into the air, and so looks large, will become large. It fit perfectly with the game’s structure and developer Pillow Castle should be applauded for not muddying it.In the video game “Superliminal,” items become the size they appear to the player. Superliminal surprised me, not only by how simple its message was, but also by how much it resonated. One of my biggest bugbears with puzzle games - and The Soujourn is a good example - is that they try to over-engineer a story to contain its challenges. The final ten minutes or so ramp up the pace (and in some cases the nausea) but not the danger, a move which makes sense when the ending is explained. The collaboration feels uneasy in a game with no time limit or real understanding of your reason for being there, but even without the narration the game would have been fun to play. The computerised voice of the AI is the opposite, commenting when you take the “wrong” direction and attempting to heighten emotion at various points. Your character is in some sort of Inception-like dream state at a clinic run by a calm Scottish doctor who communicates with you via radios you discover. ![]() The lack of conflict is soothing in a way. Doors can be removed and discarded, wedges of cheese grown to impossible sizes, and neon exit signs vastly expanded to illuminate darkened rooms or activate multiple floor panels at once. Once you get your head around that - and doing so is a challenge in itself as the game gives you almost zero instruction - you’ll be tasked with moving forward through each new room by manipulating the objects within to form ramps, bridges, stairs and more. Everything’s size is relative to how you see it, not how large it actually is. Hold it in relation to the floor you're standing on and let go at your feet… and it becomes tiny. Pick up a can of soda and bring it close enough to you so that it fills the room and release it, and it will indeed fill the room. ![]() As the game repeatedly tells you, perspective is reality. Without going all Father Ted on you, Superliminal plays around with size and distance in a way I’ve not seen in a game before. But it carves out a unique niche thanks to its main mechanic: perspective. Superliminal shares some of the tropes of the first-person puzzlers that came before it such as The Spectrum Retreat and Portal, but also the meta narration and often dream-like surrealism that The Stanley Parable nailed.
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