There I am in a room with a very large apple. This area of Superliminal is centered around duplication puzzles, so interacting with said apple spawns a slightly smaller clone, but that doesn’t appear to be useful in light of the fan and steep ramp placed between the apple’s starting point and the button I need to place an object on. After much experimentation, I simply move to the top of the ramp, pan the camera down so that the apple looks like it’s above the button, and interact with it to circumvent the obstacles and spawn a clone exactly where I need it to be. Superliminal by Pillow Castle Games is a game about challenging your perceptions like that. Objects can be picked up and dropped at vast distances while retaining the size that they are in your hand, allowing you to shrink and grow anything you can pick up. Many mechanics only show up for short sequences before being replaced by something even stranger, too, allowing Superliminal to surprise you constantly all the way to its ending.

Superliminal review navigation (click a link to jump directly to that section): Story review | Gameplay review | Visuals and music review

Superliminal is a game in which you become stuck while lucid dreaming

The game begins with a commercial for the Pierce Institute’s Somnasculpt technology, which promises dream therapy designed to help people put things into perspective and increase their feelings of confidence and self-worth. You play as the latest person going through this Somnasculpt therapy, which places you in a lucid dream state called I-LIDS, only for your orientation to go awry and require heading off of the beaten path. This causes you to become lost in dreams (and dreams-within-a-dream) with no obvious way of escaping besides heading forward and hoping that the doctor in charge can find a way to extricate you from the mild peril you’re in before you drift so far off-course that it becomes a bigger problem.

As you navigate through Superliminal‘s rooms and overcome their puzzles, you’ll find radios that often contain updates from Dr. Glenn Pierce. His reassuring demeanor clashes with the bad news he’s frequently forced to deliver, with his don’t-freak-out delivery always being good for a chuckle.

On the other end of things is the Standard Orientation Protocol, a blunt AI voice representing the first steps of the Somnasculpt process. Since it’s during orientation that you become lost and this whole situation makes her look bad, she chimes in to make demands and offer suggestions. The early similarities to GLaDOS/SHODAN-style AIs might lead you to suspect that she plays a deeper role, but she exists primarily to complain and chide you for reflecting poorly on her.

I found myself wishing that the Standard Orientation Protocol had a little more to do, but Superliminal is written and paced just about perfectly otherwise. One of the biggest surprises I encountered was just how uplifting the story became by the end. I can’t delve too deeply into that statement for fear of ruining the experience for someone, but suffice it to say that Superliminal takes a bit of a motivational turn toward the end. Part of that has to do with the music suddenly picking up and taking center stage, but everything is also tied together into a nice little bow. This is one of the rare games that nails its ending.

Most of the mechanics here are designed to prey on your expectations

Superliminal is a puzzle game first and foremost, though its brand of puzzle isn’t what you might expect from the genre. This game’s puzzles are usually limited to a single room, with just a handful of rare puzzles requiring grabbing something from another room, and most rooms have doors that forbid bringing objects with you. The challenge isn’t to manage a large number of moving parts so much as seeing the room for what it is instead of how your brain initially wants to perceive it. For example, I spent several minutes stuck in an endless maze that loops back on itself until I realized that the first door I looked at was always a brick wall. There are signs that indicate which door you need to go through, which meant looking at the opposite door first to ensure that the correct door was open. Superliminal is packed full of totally unique areas like this.

Many mechanics—such as the item duplication I mentioned earlier—only show up for short sequences before being replaced with something new. Toward the end of the game, the lighting might suggest that you’re looking at a staircase, only for it to be a wall. Thing is, you can move through part of that wall like a door and use the mirror-world reflection on the other side as a staircase. Blocks are just blocks until you grab one and its side comes off, revealing a hidden elevator shaft.

Anything can be anything, but the puzzles are self-contained enough to keep Superliminal‘s shifting rules from becoming overwhelming. You also have one go-to mechanic that follows you throughout the game: anything you pick up and bring to your face can be dropped near or far away while retaining its size. If you pick up a small object and drop it across the room, it’ll suddenly be very large. Manipulating the size and placement of objects leads to some very interesting puzzles.

More than anything, though, it’s remarkable how polished, bug-free, and natural all of these mind-bending mechanics manage to be. Outside of a single instance where I clipped into a vent while figuring out a puzzle (leading to a bug that’s purely visual), everything worked exactly as expected. It takes a little while to acclimate to your ability to grab items from far away, but once you do, changing the sizes and positions of objects is a remarkably intuitive process. Pillow Castle Games deserves credit for making a game that subverts your expectations without its puzzle solutions ever feeling unnatural. This does cause many of them to be easy, but that’s also the whole point: once you become willing to look at things from a different perspective, it becomes much easier to work out solutions. I vastly prefer that approach to puzzles that last longer but make less sense.

The visuals do interesting things, while the soundtrack mostly hangs back

I should probably start off by mentioning that there are a couple of sequences with flashing lights and trippy visuals that could conceivably cause problems for some people. One section has a lot of elevators, and moving through this area made me feel a little motion sick. Superliminal is more ambitious with its visuals than its early areas suggest, though. Everything looks normal until you realize that the lighting is used to obscure passages from you. Sometimes, objects are cloaked in blackness and can only be seen by walking backward and seeing their outline against the lit area you just came from. Objects that look like they can be interacted with might be painted on the wall to give that misleading impression based on your perspective, or transform from a solid object to a decal on the wall the moment you drop them. You do a lot of teleporting, too, and area transitions are seamless, with the only loading screens occurring at elevators. Picking up a small house, enlarging it, and then entering a portal inside to travel to a completely different area without encountering a single loading screen is a technical marvel. This is game engine mastery.

Superliminal‘s soundtrack didn’t leave quite as much of an impression on me. Don’t get me wrong—the switch from cheery elevator-style music to silence when moving from a colorful hallway into a dark and shadowy backstage area is undeniably effective at shifting the atmosphere in a hurry. This happens enough times that it begins to lose its impact, however, and I can only think of two tracks that added anything more than moodiness, with both being toward the end of the game. It’s all produced well enough, but I can’t see any of the tracks sticking with me.

Story: 2.5/3 Gameplay: 3/3 Visuals: 1.5/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★★★★☆☆ – 8/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*An Epic Games store key was provided for this Superliminal review. How long it lasts depends on how often you get stuck, but I’d estimate that it’ll last most people 2-4 hours.

Superliminal review – Perception is reality first appeared on Killa Penguin