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.