Superliminal
Year: 2019
Rating: E
Time Played: ~2 hours
I can appreciate it when a game tries to do something different. In Superliminal, the main gameplay mechanic revolves around the idea of forced perspective. Something small can appear large if you hold it up to your eyes, and vice versa. Superliminal fully explores this concept in the psychologically unending liminal spaces of an individual trapped in a dream. Unfortunately, it attempts to be witty about this setting in a way that (as with many indie first-person puzzle games) tries too hard to be Portal 2.
What Superliminal does well is its puzzles. Not only is it satisfying to shrink and grow items using forced perspective, but having to align items in just the right way to match with the background uses the right amount of brainpower to be engaging. Most of the puzzles are fairly straightforward and I only struggled with a few of them that suffered from dim lighting (for ambiance/tone’s sake). Each puzzle naturally led to the next one in the game, which kept me playing for so long that I basically completed the entire game in a single sitting. Truly, the gameplay in Superliminal is captivating.
Of course, as with most indie first-person puzzle games, the puzzles can’t stand by themselves. The puzzles need the plot to compel the player to do what they were going to do anyway: finish the puzzles. I appreciate how the eerie liminal setting gave me shivers in a few spots, usually when the lighting was not the best. However, the narrator that occasionally spoke up through the radios scattered throughout the levels felt a little forced. I would have liked if there was a more natural way to convey this information through the puzzles (like through the “déjà vu” section) instead of having the narrator give exposition dumps.
A clever visual gameplay concept that exposition dumps a little too much of its plot, I give Superliminal 4.0 stars out of 5.
