Developer: Pillow Castle

Publisher: Pillow Castle

Played on: PC

Release Date: November 5, 2020

Played with: Mouse & Keyboard

Paid: $15.73 (multi-game bundle)

---

It boggles my mind thinking about what went into programming Superliminal.  This is a game where you can pick up a dollhouse, hold it in the air and let it fall to the floor at ten times its previous size, then walk inside it and find a whole new part of the level to explore.  The game centres around the idea of playing with perspective, where objects that appear small at a distance suddenly are small when you pick them up.  Objects phase into existence by lining up abstract pieces at the correct angle, or turn into streaks of paint on the wall when looked at the wrong way.  It can be a bit of a head trip, with the game using its setting of dreams within dreams as a means of excusing these impossible occurrences.  However, what surprised me most about Superliminal wasn’t the strange perspective shifts or occasionally trippy visuals, but how I ultimately found the whole experience to be … boring.

The biggest problem with Superliminal is that it leans into the basic mechanism of “make thing big to climb on it or go inside” far too much.  Especially for the first two-thirds of the game, it felt like 90% of the puzzles boiled down to some variation of this core idea, and it got old really quickly.  Picking up a small object, holding it up in the air so the game thought it was far away, and letting it fall to the ground at a much larger size became a tried and tested formula that was my first port of call for nearly every puzzle.

What made matters worse was that the game could often be quite finicky with these mechanisms.  Make an object too big, and suddenly your character can’t jump on top of it.  Make it too small, and you won’t be able to jump to the next ledge.  So many puzzles were a challenge, not because it was difficult to figure out the solution, but because the solution was a nuisance to execute, with lots of fine-tuning and finagling sizes dragging things out far longer than they should have taken.  It also didn’t help that an occasional bug cropped up where objects dropped from a great height would fall through the floor and either vanish or reappear in a random place.  Thankfully, this never happened with any mission-critical objects that would force me to reset to a checkpoint, but it nonetheless took me out of the experience.

Accompanying you through Superliminal are a couple of voices that play over an intercom and radios scattered throughout the environments, giving instructions and words of wisdom in the same vein as GLaDOS or Cave Johnson from the Portal series.  Unfortunately, while clearly trying to ape the humour and style of Valve’s iconic characters, they lack all the charm.  A few lines did get a smirk out of me, but overall the whole gimmick quickly lost its appeal.  They also kind of wreck the ending, with Dr. Pierce, the man in charge of the dream experiment you’re taking part in, literally monologuing about what it all means and how this was actually a very deep and impactful experience.  It reeks of pretentiousness, and while I think the idea of making a game about new perspectives literally be about perspective is somewhat clever, having it spelled out really felt like talking down to the player.

All that being said, I do think that the game got better as it went.  In its latter third, Superliminal starts to lean a bit more heavily into the trippy nature of dreams, and it comes out the better for it.  Floors and walls sometimes exist and sometimes don’t, the world starts getting rotated like in the climax of Inception, and even the simple act of picking up an object might teleport you to an entirely new area.  The music picks up a bit as well, with the laid-back ballads of previous levels swapped out for a more driving, propulsive score that makes you feel like a master of the dream world.  It made me wish that more of the experience had this level of interesting interactions and spectacle about it, rather than the repetitive puzzle solving of the earlier levels.

In addition to the main story, Superliminal also features multiplayer modes, allowing you to play through the game in co-op (something which I didn’t test but seems wholly unnecessary on the face of it) or mess around in a competitive battle royale.  The “battle royale” tag is a bit deceiving, as the only “battle” going on is a race to finish a level.  Using the same mechanisms as the base game, you’ll hunt around for exits in piles of blocks, navigate nearly blind through dark rooms, and yes, make things big to climb on top of them.  It’s pretty much the textbook definition of “fine”, and probably could have been fleshed out more, but I think the biggest mistake was making all players play in the same instance.  Rather than having each player running by themselves in a private instance of the race before comparing times at the end, everyone is competing on the same field, meaning that finding the exit to a maze is just a matter of following all the other players.  If one player makes a block big to get to the exit, everyone else just has to jump on that block and follow them.  It meant that most of my time in the multiplayer mode was spent piggybacking off other people’s work and not engaging with the only mechanisms that make Superliminal interesting.

Superliminal feels like a game that’s tailor-made for streamers.  It’s got all sorts of weird visual twists that seem designed to get the player to gawk at the camera while the chat goes wild.  Yet sitting down alone to play it in my office felt empty.  I can appreciate the craft that must have gone into creating the game, but it comes away feeling like little more than a tech demo for something bigger.  It’s not bad; particularly towards the end there were a few points where I sat back and said, “Okay, that’s clever,” out loud.  Unfortunately, spectacle can only get you so far, and the actual play of Superliminal was decidedly tepid.  This is one new perspective that may be worth ignoring.

6/10