“The song of the years, the melody of life. Everything else - is not you, all others are strangers. And you yourself, who are you? You don't know. You'll get to know it later, when you string the beads of memory. You'll be what is most endearing, most cruel and most eternal.”

- Sasha Sokolov, School for Fools

Um museu construído através de fragmentos de uma vida. Cada caixinha de texto, uma pedrada. Díficil encontrar mais emoção por metro quadrado do que aqui.

Ainda que extremamente pessoal, seus personagens e galerias representam uma universalidade presente no bizarro gerado a partir do real, quando vistos por imaginativos olhos infantis, criando pontes da Escócia até Minas Gerais, me fazendo sentir que também vivi, em partes, a vida que ele viveu. Sem falar uma palavra, apenas através da forma como se apresenta, também conecta a relação que um tem entre a nebulosa memória da infância e a sobriedade da realidade adulta.


Possui certo atrito um pouco desagradável devido aos bugs/crashes e controles um pouco frustrantes. Só tome o cuidado de salvar constantemente.

Pros:
+The Colossi look amazing
+Riding around on one, especially the flying ones, is cinematic and incredible-feeling
+The environment looks incredible
+The puzzle elements of the boss fights feels rewarding to figure out for the first time
+The soundtrack is epic

Cons:
-Despite the amazing looking scenery, the world itself is devoid of anything, making going through it 16 times in a row a huge slog, which is made worse by the two following cons:
-The horse controls like crap
-The camera is pretty bad, but especially so while riding the horse
-The fact you need to raise your sword and draw power before you stab makes the CONSTANT losing of grip due to the Colossi moving around unbearable
-Same with trying to climb around the Colossi, as you often manage to make zero progress because your character keeps swaying for like 30 seconds straight
-Too much of the boss fights is just playing the waiting game
-Being knocked down takes way too long to get back up. Especially annoying in fights where the enemy will knock you down, then as soon as you start getting back up they knock you down again, over and over and over.

Mixed:
~The sword acting as a homing beacon is a neat idea, but the vagueness of it just leads to dead ends.

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.