The entire concept of the game revolves around forced perspective, and how we have to manipulate it, so that’s kind of an obvious lesson. Instead, the big narrative moment comes with the ending, where we learn that the main theme and lesson we’re to take away from all this is that sometimes to get past obstacles in our life, we need to look at things from a different perspective. We end up learning nothing about our main character or what the visuals we find in the game mean, and the hints of an evil AI or something in a similar vein interfering with things never come to fruition. The narrative, on the other hand…well, sadly, it isn’t exactly Portal quality. And visually, it has a ton of optical illusions and mind screws when you interact with a few objects, which are always a neat touch. The emphasis is likely less of the puzzle difficulty and more on the narrative and visual spectacle. And this may be due to the fact that while preview clips may give the impression that you can grow and shrink whatever items needed to progress, in reality you only get about one or two items per room that you can interact with, so it doesn’t take long to figure out a solution. Despite throwing a few occasional gimmicks in certain levels, such as items that multiply when you check on them or areas where you have to move around doorways in order to manipulate your size, the overall difficulty level never seems to escalate. One of the big flaws of Superliminal is that it’s clever, but rarely is it challenging. It all makes a great first impression, but after that, things start to feel a bit shallow. It truly does feel like the type of world you would encounter in a dream, complete with nice lo-fi music that sets the mood. You also get several impressive visuals as well, with some of the optical illusions being outstanding and contrasting nicely with the sleek hotel decor. So you can, say, grab an an exit sign held a few feet away from your face, drop it in front of a far away platform, and boom, you have a giant ramp to help you get up. Simply grab an object, move it around and rotate it if needed, and let go to place it down in a new area. Not only does it make a clever idea, it’s easy to pull off in the game. The first thing that should easily catch your attention in Superliminal is, rightfully so, its central gimmick of forced perspective puzzles. This means going through several layers of this dream world, which end up getting more insane in various ways as you progress. But then something goes wrong during the orientation and you find yourself going off the rails and behind the scenes and now you have to trigger the emergency protocol in order to wake up. You enter as a lucid dreamer, wandering around a hotel, getting used to being able to warp the sizes of certain objects in your surroundings. Superliminal takes the form of a dream therapy session known as Somnasculpt, designed by the enigmatic Dr. Which means it really, really hurts when I have to say that the end result ends up being pretty…meh. An impressive-looking game built around forced perspective, it’s quite the ambitious game, and developers Pillow Castle are clearly proud of all the work they’ve done. What if it turns out that it wasn’t worth the wait? Do you really want to be the jerk who gives the game a low score, knowing just what went into it? Such is the dilemma with games such as Superliminal here, a first-person puzzler that took nearly six years to complete. After all, it can be easy to worry over a game that the developers have poured a lot of their life’s work into. Hello, and welcome back to yet another lesson about things you will eventually come to dread as a game critic! Today, we’ll be discussing labors of love, games that have taken years and years to complete.
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