Seen this way, this new proposal of narrative puzzles may seem like the umpteenth pretentious interactive experiment that does not go beyond the effects of its staging. Superliminal, without revealing anything really significant about its plot, it can be taken as a kind of interactive psychoanalysis in which the player, in the first person, experiences a series of sensations and inquiries through dreamlike scenarios in which to play with perspective. Nothing is what it seems … or maybe it is? Let’s see what this curious mix of Portal, walking simulator and other experimental titles can offer us, such as the notable The Stanley Parable Below we analyze Superliminal on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. Unfortunately, Superliminal is left halfway in certain aspects, leaving the player wanting more despite his many virtues, especially in the field of the unexpected and imaginative. And Superliminal, the work of Pillow Castle, is positioned as one of those daring bets that do not stay on the surface to propose to the player a whole universe of its most suggestive in which the known rules have no place. It fit perfectly with the game’s structure and developer Pillow Castle should be applauded for not muddying it.Puzzle video games are not the most popular or the best-selling, although they are a genre that has left us with timeless gems, imaginative, surprising titles and that sometimes encourage us to break with what is established to experience new sensations for their controls. Superliminal surprised me, not only by how simple its message was, but also by how much it resonated. One of my biggest bugbears with puzzle games - and The Soujourn is a good example - is that they try to over-engineer a story to contain its challenges. The final ten minutes or so ramp up the pace (and in some cases the nausea) but not the danger, a move which makes sense when the ending is explained. The collaboration feels uneasy in a game with no time limit or real understanding of your reason for being there, but even without the narration the game would have been fun to play. The computerised voice of the AI is the opposite, commenting when you take the “wrong” direction and attempting to heighten emotion at various points. Your character is in some sort of Inception-like dream state at a clinic run by a calm Scottish doctor who communicates with you via radios you discover. The lack of conflict is soothing in a way. Doors can be removed and discarded, wedges of cheese grown to impossible sizes, and neon exit signs vastly expanded to illuminate darkened rooms or activate multiple floor panels at once. Once you get your head around that - and doing so is a challenge in itself as the game gives you almost zero instruction - you’ll be tasked with moving forward through each new room by manipulating the objects within to form ramps, bridges, stairs and more. Everything’s size is relative to how you see it, not how large it actually is. Hold it in relation to the floor you're standing on and let go at your feet… and it becomes tiny. Pick up a can of soda and bring it close enough to you so that it fills the room and release it, and it will indeed fill the room. As the game repeatedly tells you, perspective is reality. Without going all Father Ted on you, Superliminal plays around with size and distance in a way I’ve not seen in a game before. But it carves out a unique niche thanks to its main mechanic: perspective. Superliminal shares some of the tropes of the first-person puzzlers that came before it such as The Spectrum Retreat and Portal, but also the meta narration and often dream-like surrealism that The Stanley Parable nailed.
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