In one of the few environmental gags to actually land, I see a garbage can in a recycling bin. My cursor becomes an awkwardly drawn smiley face. A loading bar fills up, only for the frame to expand to the left and fill again. The few clever tricks that make me actually feel on edge play with the sense of how we’re used to interact with games in general, not with these puzzles in particular. That was true! But it wasn’t with the dream, it was with the game itself. Pillow CastleĪt one point, the character who is supposed to be testing me - there’s Portal, again - informs me that I’m “exhibiting signs consistent with an increase in fear, hopelessness, and frustration.” I can tell where the jokes are, but they don’t hit with the weight they should. Superliminal’s characters get stuck in the same patterns and emotional tone throughout the game, without enough variance for them to come across as characters with their own desires and stakes. The companions in Superliminal are too flat to make much of an impression, if you’ll pardon my pun. There just isn’t the sense of urgency that the design is clearly trying to inspire in me. Even as the game is trying to suggest a sense of isolation and escalation through environmental cues, like soda cases stacked to read DIE as I approach a door, or increasingly incoherent and desperate whiteboards covered in scribbled pleas for me to WAKE UP, I don’t really feel alarmed or concerned. Superliminal struggles as hard to connect on an emotional level as it does to work on a mechanical level. Glenn tries to soothe me but fails, and the female AI repeatedly chides me angrily for not dreaming correctly. I am accompanied by voices as I descend into a dream world, including the affable but unhelpful Dr. As I go deeper into the dream and the world becomes less logical, I paradoxically feel more constricted, not less. I’m moving from segmented level to level trying to figure out what the game wants me to do, instead of having fun with everything that I’ve been shown is possible. This often makes Superliminal feel like Portal. You can’t make everything bigger or smaller, and there are doors every so often that block you from bringing your useful soda cans, exit signs, or chess pieces into the next level. The problem is that Superliminal isn’t a sandbox it’s a puzzle game. It feels like a magic trick, but one that I control. I spend my first hour or so with the game making boxes bigger and then smaller again while chuckling to myself. The key mechanicĮverything comes down to the idea of tampering with reality through the use of perspective, which is legitimately very neat.

It sounds soothing, right up until it becomes clear that something, somewhere, has gone wrong, and I’m stuck inside a dream that very quickly begins to feel like a nightmare.

I don’t know who I am, but I’m clearly here to test a program and learn something in the process. You see, I’m in a therapy session conducted via dreams. It’s not about what’s real, it’s about what looks real. Portraits, seen in the right way, can become doorways to another environment. I can pick it up as if it were a physical object, and now it’s in my hands. If I stand just right, the block looks real. Later, I find an orange block painted on the walls. This is the key mechanic of Superliminal. However, when I turn and place the soda at the end of the hall, I’ve played a clever trick I can now walk towards the soda can to find its grown to a massive size. When I hold the soda in my hands, it’s quite small. I stand in the hallway of a quiet medical facility, and grab a can of soda from a vending machine. Superliminal is a puzzle game in which perception is reality.

Superliminal exit door puzzle