Video Game Review: Superliminal

Superliminal

Pillow Castle

Surrealist First Person Puzzler

Nintendo Switch

I believe the technical, professional term for a game like Superliminal is “technological witchcraft”. In less direct but perhaps more descriptive terms, Superliminal is a dream logic simulator puzzle game where obstacles are overcome by the player changing their perspective to actually impact the space around them. A room might require the player to, for example, move an object closer to or further away from themselves to adjust its size or adjust the size of a door in that manner to in turn scale the room beyond the door. As one might expect, this leaves a lot of room for the game to get weird, but that’s, unfortunately, the most interesting thing about it.

Superliminal first came to my attention several months ago when the developers released a short video demonstrating the mechanics they were putting together. I, like everyone I saw commenting on it, was wowed by the imaginative tricks they were pulling off, both due to the pure spectacle of them and because of the programming prowess needed to implement them. While my mind is no less blown now that I have the game in my hands and got to mess around with those mechanics myself, I also find myself underwhelmed. As cool as it is in concept and as impressive as I’m sure the coding behind the spectacle is, Superliminal feels like a one-trick pony. Despite the game not being especially long, it starts to feel like more of the same well before it ends. This feeling is not helped by the repetitive environment design which does very little to make any of the puzzles stand out from one another.

The issue I have with the game’s lack of variety is not to say that the actual level design is bad, because that is distinct from environmental aesthetic. The puzzles themselves did continue to make me think, and I actually had to spend a decent amount of time on some of them, particularly near the end. Again, the mechanics are very cool and creative and from a purely gameplay perspective Superliminal is sound, it’s just that the game isn’t quite interesting enough as a whole to carry those mechanics. In addition to the uninspired environments, the game’s story fell a bit flat for me. There are disembodied voices giving humorous guiding dialogue throughout – I can’t help but be reminded of Portal and The Stanley Parable – and initially I thought the dry gags they delivered were setting up an interesting commentary. Unfortunately, the writing swerved at the very end, and the conclusion actually delivered was disappointing.

Superliminal is an ambitious title with some impressive ideas, which makes the sense of missed potential all the more disappointing. Though there are worse things a game can do than to be slightly bland it’s not an ideal situation either, and it ultimately makes a game as mediocre as something with slightly flawed mechanics. I wish I could sing more praises of Superliminal, but as things stand it’s one of those titles that I’ll probably forget about in a month.