Superliminal – Review (PC)

By Dave Lambden Last updated Dec 10, 2019

“Nothing is more challenging than the difficulty of changing perceptions. If this is a place of pure perspective, isn’t this a place where a new point of view can make anything possible?”

These are the powerful words of Dr. Glenn Pierce. This mysterious character serves to simultaneously haunt, confuse, and educate you along your journey of the Somnasculpt Sleep Therapy Clinic. Superliminal is a new first person puzzler from developer Pillow Castle Games that challenges players to change their perspective and look at everything from a new point of view.

Superliminal takes an undoubtedly unique approach to puzzle solving by allowing players to manipulate depth perception. You interact with objects found within the environment to get from point A to point B – just like you would in any number of puzzle games. The differences come in the way you maneuver those objects to serve your purposes. Seemingly tiny objects can be expanded multiple times their current size and used to traverse puzzle rooms. This is all done by toying with an object’s depth relative to your character’s position. Approaching a block may show its current size as quite small. But picking it up and moving it further away from a player’s point of view quickly makes it balloon to fill almost an entire room.

The same can be done with other objects hidden throughout the facility. Exit signs and doors can be torn from walls and reshaped to create ramps and stairways to otherwise inaccessible platforms. Tiny chess pieces are stretched out to act as switches for pressure pad controlled doors. In some cases, you’ll even need to play with your own position for items to animate and become maneuverable. An image of a table painted across a corner of the wall may seem like a poorly planned out wall decoration. But by standing in the right spot, the table can look like it’s actually there in the third dimension. Thus, by playing with your perspective, the item transforms into a real object rather than a flat image.

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As unique as these size and image bending mechanics may be, they aren’t always fun to play with. Trying to move an inch to the left or right to get an image to line up can get tiresome. Wandering around an empty room for several minutes trying to find that one tiny object that you’re supposed to be able to interact with became tedious. Taking multiple attempts to drag and drop an object to just the right size for it to serve its purpose can be downright frustrating. Completing puzzles in Superliminal was always satisfying but, in some cases, the process can feel cumbersome.

Dreams can often seem terribly real and, given that the game is set in an experimental sleep clinic, the challenge of what is real and what isn’t persists throughout. Superliminal’s theme of a “new point of view can make anything possible” extends far beyond the primary gameplay mechanics. As you traverse the game’s nine stages, you’ll begin to question what you’re seeing and what it all means. One level of particular note takes place in what appears to be the scene of a very recent massacre. The first inclination is to think you’re inside of a nightmare simulation and a vicious murderer is right around the corner. But by the end of the level you realize that if you had attempted to take a different point of view, you wouldn’t be so quick to fall victim to your own subconscious.

Despite Superliminal‘s sometimes less than comfortable gameplay mechanics, it provides an extremely unique take on the genre. Coupling that with a minimalistic but impactful narrative on how we can chose to live our own lives make it a memorable experience, even if not always that fun as a game.