POV: You have taken mushrooms at a house party and every attempt to play with perspective, shapes and colours is being interrupted by a guy you don’t really know explaining the plot of Inception to you; the door appears to be locked or missing.

This is Superliminal, a game about changing your point of view to overcome problems with out-the-box thinking. You will sometimes have to step so far outside of that box that you will find yourself inside a YouTube walkthrough because you are only permitted to solve each of these puzzles with a single pre-determined solution.

There are some phenomenal visual tricks and spaces here, but ultimately Superliminal has been sandwiched by two 2021 releases at opposite ends of its perception-playing spectrum: Psychonauts 2 uses the same space-within-space and object-outwith-space effects, but doesn’t concern itself with making players understand or break these phenomena into composite pieces to be comprehended - they’re merely decoration in service of psychosis platforming; KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION, in another dimension, has its player observe these technical phenomena without any expectation of conventional interaction, understanding that the act of seeing spectacle is more than enough and that illusions should be protected from close examination. Superliminal occupies an awkward middle ground between these two experiences, forcing players into kaleidoscopes that initially feel boundless, but are gradually reduced to traditional video game boxes as the pre-ordained solutions to their problems fail to reveal themselves and we begin to mash the [USE] key on physics objects.

This is, of course, a really fancy way of saying that I got frustrated with a bunch of the puzzles here and ended up pissed off at cool optical illusions and spatial trickery. But shouldn’t a game about lucid dreams within lucid dreams feel more boundless than this? Why do I have to play with unreliable physics objects to get to a far-off ledge when a dreamer would choose to fly there instead?

There was an amusing bit towards the end of the game where I glitched a bouncy castle through the floor and then stepped through a connecting portal into its negative space, spending fifteen minutes wandering around outside the boundaries of the gamespace, admiring the bugged linedefs and surreal wooshing sounds while looking for my next task. “Ah. This is more like it. This is a dream.” was my thought - imagine my disappointment when I found out one of game’s the most exciting moments was a noclip! A game about boundless, limitless dreams where most rooms look like a dentist lobby. Who among us dreams of block switch puzzles?!

There is a fair amount of excitement-and-wonder-by-design here, thankfully, and most of it is concentrated into the final 30 minutes of this linear trip through the unconscious - but even then, you’ll no doubt drop the ball of building momentum at some point when the game suddenly decides that certain walls can be walked through or you can’t get a slice of cheese to stay at the right size (why didn’t they just let us manually grow/shrink objects?). In my end, the epilogue monologue was drowned out by a twinkly-twinkly “you are special” piano piece, which felt like something of an apt summary of the game at large - big ideas, smothered by technical awkwardness. Worth checking out because it’s only two hours long, but like Inception it’s a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream that will feel like it went on for much longer. You will be relieved to finally wake up.

cool concept executed to mixed results

puzzles are all too easy and the narration tries way too goddamn hard to be portal, the stanley parable and a self help book all at the same time while succeeding at none of them

it's alright and has some interesting moments but it's so brief and simplistic overall that the whole game feels like a glorified tutorial. play antichamber instead

Superliminal is a physics-based puzzle game with a lot of unique and surprising mechanics that I’ve never experienced in anything else I’ve played before. However, in some ways, it feels more like a tech demo than a game. It’s a hodgepodge of interesting ideas that don’t really make a coherent experience. I feel like there was a lot of potential for Superliminal to be something more impressive than it currently is. Upon completing it, it fails to leave much of an impact, despite clearly attempting to do so.

Writing about how this game’s mechanics work is a huge pain because they’re really difficult to put into words. Essentially, the game is about utilizing your visual perspective to manipulate objects and the environment to solve puzzles. For example, one of the earliest things you can do in the game is increase or decrease the size of objects by moving them closer or farther away from you. You can then use those objects as platforms or move them over walls. This is just one of the many perspective-based mechanics that the game utilizes. These mechanics are very cool when experiencing them for the first time. I definitely said “wow” and “woah” out loud as I experimented and learned about how they worked as well as what I could do with them. The problem is that as the game goes on, these mechanics are constantly discarded without ever being expanded upon. As a result, nothing really leaves a lasting impression in this game. I feel like I’m at a funhouse at an amusement park when I play Superliminal, constantly switching from one neat looking attraction to the other.

The game does have a story, but it doesn’t go anywhere or have anything really interesting to say. Its key message falls flat because it’s meant to coincide with the developers’ assumed difficulty of the game. The thing is, the game isn’t really hard, and it’s super short. As a result, the core theme of the story just feels like preachy rhetoric. It comes off as desperately wanting to leave some sort of emotional impact on the player, but its attempts to do so just don’t really pan out. There are sections of the game that have some darker narrative implications and the game does a great job at setting up a tense atmosphere during these sections, to the point where they border on horror. But these sections never go anywhere beyond presenting new mechanics, and as a result, they’re discarded and abandoned alongside them.

Superliminal just feels like a presentation of neat ideas and that’s about it. Since it doesn’t really push its mechanics beyond just figuring out how they work, nothing really sticks with you after having played it. This combined with its low difficulty and short playtime causes it to feel like a game that you just quickly move on from. It isn’t memorable beyond the novelty of its mechanics. It’s a decent way to kill two hours, and that’s pretty much the extent of what I can say about it.

Superliminal é um jogo em primeira-pessoa de puzzle bem diferenciado. Ele utiliza o tempo ilusões de ótica e muitas vezes se inspira em geometria não-euclidiana, tornando ele um jogo bizarro mas intrigante.

Como o jogo é focado em solução de puzzle, logo é de se imaginar que a todo momento, durante todo o jogo, você estará resolvendo puzzles dos mais variados tipos. E sim, isso ocorre em Superliminal. Porém, o jogo não é apenas sobre isso.

Superliminal traz consigo um enredo que não só explora os sonhos (toda a jornada do protagonista no jogo acontece em sonhos), mas também traz reflexão para o protagonista e ao próprio jogador sobre a vida e o papel de cada um no mundo real.

Assim, haverão momentos em que o jogador (na pele do protagonista) estará simplesmente caminhando pelos mais variados cenários, sejam eles comuns ou surreais, ao som de uma música relaxante de fundo, enquanto o Dr. Glenn Pierce (doutor que te acompanha durante os sonhos por meio de áudio) conversa sobre a vida, frases motivacionais, etc.

O jogo tem uma arte muito bela, algumas vezes simples e outras vezes mais surreais, devido à natureza mais complexa do jogo. Tem vezes que os cenários ficam realmente muito bonitos.

Agora, o que realmente chama a atenção nesse jogo são os sistemas de resolução de puzzle. Você literalmente faz de tudo o que não é convencional: altera o tamanho de objetos para auxiliar na travessia por salas, manipula portas para gerar novas entradas, atravessa labirintos psicodélicos, resolve puzzles baseados em perspectiva, onde o referencial que você atribui pra si modifica o ambiente, etc. Achei isso tudo muito legal, criativo e bonito até, apesar de alguns tipos de puzzles serem repetitivos (e olha que o jogo é curto).

Achei Superliminal muito legal. Ele não é o único e nem foi o primeiro jogo que segue esse estilo surreal, psicodélico, cheio de ilusões de ótica e mudanças de perspectiva, mas ainda assim a maneira como ele propõe puzzles que fogem do convencional e que surpreendem o jogador por serem completamente imprevisíveis me agradou bastante, ainda que seja um pouco repetitivo.

Se a história fosse mais profunda, eu poderia ter gostado ainda mais. Levando em conta o potencial que o enredo desse jogo tem, acho que daria pra ter feito algo a mais. Mas ainda assim, valeu a pena.

Sueños, percepción y superación de problemas, tanto arbitrarios como personales; Superliminal es una terapia ficticia que se traduce a nuestra realidad por medio de sistemas enfocados en perspectiva y rompecabezas de constantes giros en sus elementos, con una ambientación onírica que justifica la artificialidad de sus panoramas lúdicos, la longitud de juego y el planteamiento de su relato. Excelente cohesión temática y armonía ludo-narrativa que concluyen en un motivador mensaje de vida, uno tan simple que es fácil de ignorar pese a que siempre está frente a nosotros.

Beaten: May 12
Time: 2.5 hrs
Platform: Xbox Series X

Felt like, to me, a pale imitation of Davey Wreden (Stanley Parable + Beginner's Guide) mixed with some kinda mid Portal puzzle design. The concept is cool, the art design is cool, but the puzzle design never made me feel smart, only either frustrated or unchallenged, and the narrative would've left me completely cold if not for the pretty good music at the end

This game really, really wanted to be a spiritual successor to Portal and doesn't quite hit that level. It's an interesting enough narrative, but I don't feel like it ever earns its level of self-declared importance. Regardless, the co-op puzzles are very fun and do require you to think in new ways a lot of the time. I would give it more points, but Superliminal is also buggy as hell, at least playing co-op on PC. Regardless it's short and won't take up much of your time. I highly recommend bringing a friend or 3!

It's truly baffling to me that you can make a game about dreams and perception of reality and have such a huge proportion of it be just making the player walk down bland hallways, the same uninspired motifs plastered everywhere over and over, whilst the player desperately hovers their cursor over everything they come across to find whichever object the game arbitrarily deems interactable.

It feels like so many developers misunderstood what made Portal great, thinking that it was just the light spatial and physics puzzles accompanied by silly, fun voiceovers, when actually it was the fact that that game pushed into territory that felt legitimately experimental, surprising and exciting in the context of mainstream videogames fifteen years ago. There are a handful of cool moments in Superliminal, more than my rating really implies, but it genuinely left my imagination feeling sapped from the experience as I longed for it to stop telling me to think outside the box until such a point as it had actually done so itself.

The problem with a game that messes with your head like Superluminal is that when the game glitches, you can't tell if it was on purpose or not.

Like you've already heard by now, this is very clearly aping Portal and The Stanley Parable in terms of presentation. However! The visual tricks and perspective-based illusions do more than enough to make the game stand on its own merits. It's not too long and keeps things fresh by constantly throwing new ideas at you. It's nice when a puzzle game makes you mumble "Whoa..." every once in a while.

Definitely recommended, but only on powerful hardware. I tried this on my XB1S last year and the framerate was so low it was making me motion sick. Runs great on Series X though!

I shudder to imagine the performance on Switch.

Pretty neat, the perspective gimmick makes for some really interesting puzzles and sorta forces you to think outside the box - which is the whole point, duh.

The ending message is nice but the game could've done with more than just chill BGM for the rest of it. Really missing GLaDOS these days :( Not sure why the finale was what it was either, I'd have just made it a bit shorter and cut that out but hey ho.

Overall had a good time, worth checking out for the couple of hours it takes to beat

So...that was one of the greatest things I've ever played.

I've never been asked to think this way before. That alone makes Superliminal a worthwhile experience, but it's so packed full of ideas pushing it further and further and further that it ascends to something truly great.

Playing this game is like getting to experience as an adult what it felt like to be a toddler playing with simple toys and random objects just to figure out how the world works. It awakens that long-dormant part of the brain that I haven't experienced since being a young child myself. It's fucking magical, and nearly every area I was dropped into gave me multiple of those pure giggles that come from making something work in a way you'd never considered before. It's the sheer stress, fear, uncertainty, and joy of learning condensed into the most tightly bound package possible. Plus the genuine love for the player that Superliminal radiates feels like a warm hug.

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I will say: take the derealization / dissociation warning seriously. I've struggled with these things and this game was not a trigger for me, but I can absolutely imagine it being one if I played it in the wrong moment. Just know your limits...I think this has real therapeutic value when it comes to those issues, but the risks are real too.

Superliminal superou minhas expectativas.
Esse jogo utiliza do surrealismo por trás dos sonhos, explorando bem essa temática.
Utilizar da perspectiva dos mais diversos locais e objetos para tornar possível a conclusão dos levels fez da gameplay algo bem diferente, você não para de se surpreender cada vez mais com as diversas ilusões de ótica presentes no jogo.
Por muitas vezes a falta de sentido presente nos sonhos torna o jogo caótico de formas muito bem elaboradas, explorando bem a questão da perspectiva. A obra ainda não perde a oportunidade de brincar com o jogador, mudando a tela de loading diversas vezes e de outros modos criativos.
O final ainda trás uma mensagem que agradou-me bastante.
Achei simplesmente espetacular, gostei bastante da obra, recomendo dar uma chance, não acho que vá se arrepender. Principalmente se gosta de jogos de puzzles, como portal, por exemplo.

Superliminal is a mind-bending first person puzzler with great atmosphere, a sweet OST and some of the freshest and most innovative ideas since Portal - albeit a bit too short overall and a bit unfocused at times. Still, one of the most unique gaming experiences I've had in a while.

8/10
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It's been a good while since I've played a first person puzzler that truly surprised me with what that genre can even do.

Let's address the elephant in the room first: Yes, this game is very much in the same vein of, and strongly inspired by Valve's 'Portal'. It wears its influence proudly on its sleeve and doesn't even attempt to hide that fact, with such nods as a snarky AI lady condescendingly bossing you around, the game taking place (seemingly at least) in the bowels of an infinitely large warehouse complex and just the general humour and vibes and so on - that, and the fact that this game also features a mind-bending gimmick-mechanic that defines the core gameplay loop.

Where Portal has its, well, portals, Superliminal instead uses the power of perspective. Think back to when you were a kid, and you looked up at the moon and pretended to pick it up with your finger. How small it looked between your thumb and index finger. Now imagine you could actually pick it up and put that microscopic moon on your table. And then pick up that very same moon and drop it into the ocean, now suddenly larger than it ever was. That is, in essence, what this game is doing - that and much more.

Needless to say, this results in some of the most out-of-the-box and unexpected puzzles and situations that make your brain go "oof ouch owie" in the best way possible. Sometimes, it's not as much about solving a puzzle as it is about simply wowing you with the game design wizardry that's happening before your eyes. This is honestly one of the craziest gimmicks I've seen in any game ever, including Valve's aforementioned seminal masterpiece.

Portal is not the only game Superliminal draws inspiration from of course; the very Backrooms-y setting of the game, the general humour and vibes, the way the game constantly pulls out the rug from under you as well as the occasional voice messages we receive from Dr. Glenn Pierce are fairly reminiscent of CCC's "The Stanley Parable" in particular.

I particularly enjoyed the 'liminal space' themed environment that very likely is the namesake for the game.

Sadly, the game as a whole is very short. It can be very easily beaten in under 4 hours. I even managed to unlock an alternate ending without trying, and as such had practically fully completed the game in about 5 hours. This isn't necessarily a problem in principle, but in terms of a product review, asking 20€ for something this short-lived strikes me as rather steep. What's more is that this game doesn't really lend itself to multiple play-throughs due to the surprisingly inflexible solutions to most of the various puzzles.

As for the puzzles themselves; they are for the most part very interestingly designed but rather simple to solve. There were only very few puzzles I had to think about for longer than a few minutes, and only one I had to look up. Compared to other 1st Person Puzzlers like The Talos Principle, The Witness, Antichamber and Portal, most of the puzzles here are barely even puzzles. The thing is, I don't really hold it against the game as a flaw as crafting the most obtuse and impenetrable head-scratchers clearly wasn't the intention.

The intention is to make you go "wow" at every turn and constantly surprise you. And I would say it mostly succeeds with that, at least it did for me. There are some parts in the mid game that feel a bit underdeveloped and don't really make use of the full power of what this game can do, but the end very much makes up for it in my opinion.

As for the story; it's good enough. It didn't blow me away the way games like The Beginner's Guide or The Talos Principle did, but it worked well enough and held my interest until the end. A lesser developer would've bogged this game down with a much more in-depth exploration of the player-characters personality or exact explanations of how the dream-thing works, but Pillow Castle clearly knew better and let the game speak for itself.

While not being the hardest or most rewarding puzzler out there, Superliminal's strenghts lie in its extraordinarily creative setting and atmosphere. Hard recommend if you're a fan of experimental puzzle games.

8/10

This kind of game is like PapaJaeger catnip. I just gobble this stuff up. What starts off as a quirky, seemingly innocent puzzle solver ends up having an emotional ending that really challenges your... perspective. Puns aside, this is exactly the kind of game I like when looking for something short and sweet.

There was a lot to love with this game. The puzzles were weird and unique and were handled exceptionally well by a well designed engine. I'm not even sure how it's possible to code something like this. The levels were really well designed and felt unique from one another. The game also has a fantastic sense of humor; I laughed out loud on several occasions.

It felt thematically influenced by Portal (and even mechanically at parts) with it's inventive puzzles and kooky sense of humor. Portal will always remain king of this particular sub-genre, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm glad there are still devs out there making games like this.

76/100

Hello, my name is Dr. Glenn Pierce.

Superliminal is a game that's very dear to me, possibly my favorite puzzle game ever. I love almost everything about it, so much that I've gone out of my way to see just about everything the game has to offer. I found it a very worthwhile experience. I would easily recommend it to anybody.

The game is a feast for the eyes and ears. Almost every level in the game (I'm looking at you, Blackout.) has this unique style that uses these soft, pastel colors that easily contrasts with the dull, dimly lit back hallways of the dreams you explore and pairs with the wonderful piano music to create a calming vibe that lets you concentrate on solving puzzles. It's also funny as hell. Despite only having one actual person completely off screen and one computer voice, Superliminal has a lot of jokes that, along with some of the absolute mindfucks that the puzzles give you, will at the very least get a little smirk or nose exhale out of anybody. Let me tell you, that guy really is named Dr. Glenn Pierce.

The puzzles are amazing too. The gist of the game is that objects are resized to how large they appear to be based on how close they are when you pick them up. Basically, imagine if you didn't have depth perception and you picked something up, turned around, set it down, and suddenly it reached the ceiling or was as small as a fly. Not only will they require you to challenge how you approach puzzle solving as a whole, but there's plenty of little changes to the world around you and tons of visual gags that make great use of the central mechanic. On top of all that, there are tons of little secrets and collectibles that can easily warrant multiple trips through this therapeutic wonderland.

Despite being only an hour long, the game is packed full of meaning. Through the main mechanic that leaves you forgetting there were limits to your thinking, the reoccurring motif of chess, a game that requires you to consider every possible move and rewards unconventional ways of thinking, the many mindfucks the game will throw at you, the contrast between the warm and fuzzy puzzle rooms and the dim service hallways with nothing to pick up or do and the dichotomy between the hopeful Dr. Glenn Pierce and pessimistic, strict robotic voice, the game effortlessly and flawlessly delivers the main message it likes to scrawl all across the levels.

Perception is reality.