Superliminal
Developer/publisher Pillow Castle Format PC Release Out now
PC
Only a few minutes into Pillow Castle’s crafty firstperson puzzler, we’re reminded of Father Ted explaining perspective to a bewildered Dougal: “These are small, but the ones out there are far away.” In Superliminal, they can be both – or at least one and then the other. By grabbing and moving objects, their dimensions will change: tiny knick-knacks will come to dwarf you, while larger items can be shrunk to squeeze into narrow spaces. You’ll hold the moon in your palm, spinning it around to reveal the way ahead, and transform a piece of waxy cheese into a giant ramp up to an exit close to ceiling level. Its perception-isreality theme may not be entirely new, but the likes of Echochrome and Monument Valley never made such consistently cunning and playful use of the idea.
While solving puzzles within these dreamscapes is often about deceiving your own eyes, just as often you’re the one being fooled. There are mischievous reveals and startling optical illusions throughout Superliminal’s two-hour story. A marbled die splits into two when grabbed; an exit at the end of a long corridor turns out to be a protrusion; a giant chess piece at the end of a corridor transforms on approach to an artwork that spills out across the floor. Elsewhere, you’ll line up incomplete shapes with distant patterns to produce grabbable three-dimensional objects. Lift something up and you might remove a chunk of wall with it, or discover that the way out is down, not forward.
It’s dizzying stuff, a fever dream that’s only a short hop away from a nightmare – and Superliminal duly takes that leap, brilliantly recontextualising everyday objects to unsettling ends. If some spaces seem particularly confounding, you’re usually offered subtle visual clues to nudge you forward. To negotiate a shadowy passage, it makes sense to seek out an unconventional light source, while another room lines its walls with a sky painting: your cue to look up. It only stumbles when you find yourself scanning every corner until your reticule transforms into a hand, letting you know you’ve found the single interactive object that will help you progress. The placement of puzzles can feel arbitrary, too, though you could argue that the randomness is thematically appropriate: since when have dreams made perfect sense?
Even as you’re pulled into ever more abstract realms, your curiosity is stoked, through to a sprint finish that offers Superliminal’s most thoughtful narrative moment. It spits you out, head spinning, with a message about overcoming failure through unorthodox thinking; one last surprise in a game that encourages you to readjust your perspective in every sense.