Superliminal is a neat first-person puzzle game with its main adage being: perception is reality. And oh boy, it really is. In more ways than one.
You’ll have to work your way through some odd problems to escape a dreamworld full of rooms. As you progress further, the rooms are also increasingly… Off.
Enter the Paradox
You find yourself in an engineered dreamscape, created by the company SomnaSculpt. It’s a friendly-looking and well-lit place, although it might be a bit on the sterile side. You’re tasked with the mission of solving puzzles that mostly have to do with perspective and reality. There are a couple of different mechanics, but the most common one is the use of forced perspective to manipulate the size of objects. If, for instance, you’re holding an average-sized chess pawn in your hand, you could place it in a long hallway. It will appear to stay the same size but as soon as you drop it, it will in fact become a massive pawn at the end of that hallway. It’s a really fun mechanic that makes you think out of the box. You’ll be able to run up massive bouncy houses, escape by using a piece of cheese as a ramp, all that good and whacky stuff. Maybe you’ll even get forced up or down in size yourself… Who knows? Along the way, you’ll also be receiving some messages from Dr. Glenn Pierce, where he’ll share with you some absurd and useless information as to how you should advance. Thanks for nothing, Glenn.<
Leave the Paradox?
Entering the paradox was easy, but can we leave it easily? The rooms and their contents get out of hand quickly and you’ll realize it might not be as easy to wake up as SomnaSculpt might have originally intended. As the place gets weirder, the puzzles also get more bizarre. Some of them are fairly easy, some are perfectly within that sweet, sweet Goldilocks zone and some are really hard to figure out. This is actually also the only problem I have with the game: the inconsistency of the puzzles. I was stuck at two points in this game. Once in a forever looping hallway with the solution ultimately being really far-fetched. And once in a room-within-a-room that ended up just being there and not relevant at all to my escape. Within the context of the game, it is of course perfectly allowed for the puzzles not to make any sense.
Conclusion
I was immediately hooked on this because of its quirkiness and intriguing mechanics. It’s by no means exceptionally beautiful, but the graphics serve its purpose and that’s all I personally need. And although it’s reminiscent of Portal, it has more than enough unique angles to make this an interesting and enjoyable ride on its own merit. The ending is also very wholesome, which is always a bonus!
