Superliminal attempts to impart a larger lesson on the player before the end, but that lesson doesn’t vibe with the gameplay as much as the developers probably intended. “We crammed a story into our puzzle game-check!” This isn’t uncommon-many puzzle game stories feel like an afterthought-but it would have been nice to see a stronger marriage of gameplay and themes.Īs it stands, while there are some cool bits of environmental storytelling, the dialogue feels too much like a forced attempt at dry British humour™ to really stand out. Ultimately, the story of Superliminal feels more like a checked box than a strong concept. It’s an interesting idea that falls flat. It’s not long before it seems like something has gone wrong with the study and your goal becomes a desperate escape from your own mind. And things only get wilder from there.Īll along the way, you’re told that you are a participant in some new form of sleep therapy, delving deeper into dreams in order to come out the other side a better person. It lets you shrink a normal-sized crate down to dollhouse-size in order to fit it through a gap, pressing a pressure plate in another room. It allows you to take a tiny rubber duck, hold it close to your face so it looks gigantic in the environment, and then send a giant rubber monstrosity crashing to the ground. That forced perspective concept is at the heart of Superliminal. Have you ever sat across from someone and squinted your eyes while holding up your thumb and forefinger so it looks like you’re squishing their tiny head? Have you ever held a small object in such a way that at just the right angle it looks massive? How about those lame tourism photos where everyone uses forced perspective to make it look like they’re holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa? No, not like that. “Perception is reality.” Not only was this statement part of the advertising, but it also comes up again and again throughout the game’s world. But to give you an idea, I’ll explain one of the opening puzzles and one of the game’s key mechanics… I hesitate to say much at all about what the puzzles entail, because so much of this game is about that initial novelty. The designers anticipate what you will do and what you will try, and their goal is to surprise and delight you with some wild optical illusions. Seriously though, most of the puzzles feel like being called up on stage from the audience of a magic show. When a puzzle is solved in Superliminal, it often feels like a magic trick. Superliminal doesn’t make you feel unintelligent, but the give and take between the player and the game is completely different. “Every time I solved a puzzle I felt like a genius,” was a common talking point. It was praised for how it empowered the player. In Portal, solving a puzzle felt like gears clicking into place. Basically, any time I got stuck was the result of a different puzzle type being introduced that the game just immediately assumed I’d know what to do with.Superliminal is a Portal-esque puzzle game that completely reverses that game’s fundamental conceit. You simply need to know to use it both times, and it never comes up again. But the game does nothing to prepare you for this. Two puzzles required to progress here have you grab an illuminated sign and simply use it as a flashlight. After the early parts wowed me with their originality, it was disappointing to see the game switch to other puzzle types that don’t have much to do with them.Ī bit before the game’s midpoint, for instance, you visit an area where it’s pitch-black. It also fails to continue to add interesting new types of puzzles. The game doesn’t do a good job of making it clear how to utilize perspective to make items the size you want. To make matters worse, even they work better in concept than in practice. Unfortunately, Superliminal fails to one-up these ideas.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |