8/30/2023 0 Comments Superliminal logoThat forced perspective concept is at the heart of Superliminal. Have you ever sat across from someone and squinted your eyes while holding up your thumb and forefinger so it looks like you’re squishing their tiny head? Have you ever held a small object in such a way that at just the right angle it looks massive? How about those lame tourism photos where everyone uses forced perspective to make it look like they’re holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa? No, not like that. “Perception is reality.” Not only was this statement part of the advertising, but it also comes up again and again throughout the game’s world. But to give you an idea, I’ll explain one of the opening puzzles and one of the game’s key mechanics… I hesitate to say much at all about what the puzzles entail, because so much of this game is about that initial novelty. The designers anticipate what you will do and what you will try, and their goal is to surprise and delight you with some wild optical illusions. Seriously though, most of the puzzles feel like being called up on stage from the audience of a magic show. When a puzzle is solved in Superliminal, it often feels like a magic trick. Superliminal doesn’t make you feel unintelligent, but the give and take between the player and the game is completely different. “Every time I solved a puzzle I felt like a genius,” was a common talking point. It was praised for how it empowered the player. In Portal, solving a puzzle felt like gears clicking into place. It fit perfectly with the game’s structure and developer Pillow Castle should be applauded for not muddying it.Superliminal is a Portal-esque puzzle game that completely reverses that game’s fundamental conceit. 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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