44 Superliminal PC
Objects in the videogame may be closer than they appear
Usually, seeing is believing. Not so in Superliminal. In this forced-perspective puzzler, seeing is entirely subjective, as we soon learn in our demo. As we wander the sterile chambers in the ILID – a technological mind palace designed to recreate lucid dreaming – we find a table with chess pieces scattered across it. We pick up a pawn, bring it close to examine it – then let go, the nowhuge object hitting the floor with a thud.
Things in Superliminal are exactly as they appear: you can bend reality simply by getting a different angle on something. When a giant pawn blocks our way, we click to pick it up and the game instantaneously and invisibly resizes it so that it’s at the same scale we’re seeing it at from down the corridor. It’s a tricky concept to explain in words – in the hands, however, Superliminal’s dream logic becomes as natural as breathing.
In motion, it looks anything but simple. But designer and programmer Albert Shih’s explanation of the technical side is matter-offact. “It’s all based off, like, things look the same at different sizes and different lengths away. So it’s just that, if something is twice as far, it just needs to be twice as large. That’s it. And it turns out computers can get things so perfect that even with a little bit of error, if it looks mostly correct, then your brain goes, ‘Yeah, that’s it’.”
While many of the initial puzzles revolve around resizing objects by picking them up from various distances, we’re soon introduced to some alternate concepts. One we solve almost by accident: a pressure plate visible through a gap in a wall must be depressed to open a door, but it’s out of arm’s reach. Holding up another outsize pawn to try to size up the gap and distance, we drop it directly on the plate. We realise we’d unconsciously, intuitively aligned the object in the scene in such a way that it looked as if it was far enough away to reach the goal.
“That afterthought effect is something we like a lot – like, we kind of want you to accidentally finish the game,” designer and executive producer Christopher Floyd grins. “To keep going like, ‘I wonder if… Oh, okay, yeah – that is how that would work’.”
The majority of the demo, however, has us making objects larger in order to use them as
In Superliminal you can bend reality simply by getting a different angle on something
platforms; we start to worry whether the core gimmick has enough legs for a full game. It’s a tough thing to demo in 15 minutes without making it look reductive, Floyd laments: they don’t want to overwhelm. “But there are Easter eggs in that demo that imply other things are going to happen,” he teases. We recall some suspiciously placed fire alarms up near the ceiling in one room, and are mollified. The trailer, too, shows a chequered cube
popping into existence when 2D paintings are viewed together from a certain angle.
Then there’s the narrative packaging, which takes a leaf out of Portal’s book in its depiction of an unsettling testing facility – albeit this one’s in your own head. The emphasis on dream logic recalls Remedy’s Control, we suggest: Floyd laughs, explaining he’s realised both Control and Zachtronics’ Eliza deal with many of the same themes as Superliminal. “When shoegaze music – which I love – got really popular, like My Bloody Valentine, that was a response to how shit the UK was at that point,” he says. “People were escaping into this imaginary soundscape. And I think it’s interesting that games are doing either the terrifying AI future, or they are going into these weird dream worlds. It’s almost like a postmodern movement.
“And this is going to sound pretentious,” he continues, “but creating something which is unique to the medium… Like, you couldn’t make Superliminal as a movie. You could have the cool special effects, but you wouldn’t have that moment. So a big thing for me is trying to create something that is unique, and otherwise impossible.” He laughs. “I think you should probably describe this game as unique and impossible.”