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.
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.