Superliminal mind-bending and dreamy
Superliminal
Pillow Castle Games Available on PC
CHRISTOPHER BYRD
Have you ever had that uncanny sensation of waking up from a dream when, in reality, you are still dreaming? That disorienting feeling is the sensation that Superliminal pursues with astounding flair.
This remarkably designed puzzle game, which is very much in the spirit of Portal and The Stanley Parable, uses perspective as a gameplay mechanic. Puzzles are solved by finding the right way to look at things.
This system is given a light, psychological dimension through the brief musings of Dr. Glenn Pierce, whose job at the Sommasculpt Dream Therapy Program is to guide patients through a lucid dreaming experience.
Dr. Pierce offers his services to people struggling with selfdoubt, envy, and other negative emotions rooted in social anxiety.
“Perspective is everything,” is a phrase that recurs throughout Pierce’s program. When, as a patient, you deviate from this experience by accessing parts of the dream space you aren’t supposed to, you incur the ire of a robotic-sounding woman whose manner and voice bear no small resemblance to GLADOS from Portal.
I felt ambivalent about much of Superliminal’s storyline. But that hardly matters because the experience of playing Superliminal recommends itself many times over. The ways in which it uses forced perspective and trump-l’oeil illusions to evoke the subconscious is thrilling.
In this game, an object that seems gigantic at a distance may, when viewed from a closer distance, be much smaller, whereas something that looks solid from one angle might appear shadowy from another.
The ways in which the scale of objects can be altered is given an active cast through a novel mechanic that’s unlike anything I’ve seen in a game before. Many objects in the game, from signs to chess pieces to architecture, can be made bigger or smaller by moving them in relation to your position. For example, if you pick up a chess piece and hold it away from you toward the floor you can make it smaller while hoisting it into the air and moving in the direction of the object will make it larger.
This makes for some wonderfully surreal scenarios. You might find yourself in a room with an exit sign but no exit. Picking the sign off the wall, you can lift it up into the air and gradually make it bigger until the sign is big enough to use as a ramp that can be propped up against a wall allowing you to walk up and over the sides of the room as though it were a stage set.
Later puzzles in the game are even more trippy. One of my favourites involves finding a miniature representation of an environment you’re standing in that can be moved to another area, thus changing the location of where you’re standing.
Superliminal is dreamy, calming and mind-bending. This fourto five-hour game, which was developed by a tiny team over six years, should not be overlooked.