Fairy Tale Spotlight: Superliminal [Game Review]

[Some spoilers included.]

There were two puzzle games that I had been looking forward to all year. The first was Manifold Garden, of which I have already reviewed. The second was Superliminal. This was certainly a much shorter game, ranking in at a little over 2 hours, but the impact of it made it all just so worth it in the end.

The concept of Superliminal is that you have signed up to be placed in a state of lucid dreaming where you still have control. Dream mechanics are heavily in play during your experience. Although there are quite a few non-euclidean elements, as found in Manifold Garden, the main concept is the idea that perception is reality.

Now... in real life, perception is certainly not reality... but it can be in a dream. Something that seems far away can, in a dream, just be very small. Likewise something that's very close to your face might actually be very large. A room full of tables and chairs might just be a painting on the wall when you get a bit too close to it to break the illusion. In the latter, that was a case where perception was perhaps not reality but the polar opposite. The game messes with you in that manner as well.

With these concept in mind, you have to go room to room and solve puzzles based entirely on dream logic. It requires you to think in irrational ways to solve puzzles. When people get stuck in this game, it is often because they have trouble breaking free of what they understand about the real world. To beat this game, you have to give most of that up, or you'll just end up in a room that doesn't seem to go anywhere.

That almost happened to me a few times. I remember being trapped in and endlessly looping room with white walls with windows in them on two sides. I really could not figure out how to get out of there. What I ended up finding out was that the room did not actually have walls. What I thought was a wall was actually just the white space beyond it. The windows were just free hanging there in space. I was simply able to just walk past them and out into the open, escaping the trap. But the point is that the rational side of my brain had convinced me that there was a wall there.

Another really odd experience had to do with portals. Some objects have doors attached to them. By using the perspective mechanic, you can make these doors as big or small as you want. If you make the door extremely huge, you'll come out on the other side as a very tiny person. This confused me for a bit. There was one part where I messed up so many times that I actually ended up about the size of an ant, which made walking around a giant room take forever. I did finally figure out the solution though.

The point of the game was ultimately delivered, and indeed it was profound. The game actually encourages this sort of thinking even outside of dreams. It wants you to try real hard and see the problems you have in life from different angles and perspectives. What most people do when they have a problem is that they try as hard as they can to not deal with it as much as they can... and the way that they deal with it tends to be a very repetitive paltry effort that ultimately doesn't do anything at all.

If we actually bother to see things with our eyes open, we may be surprised to see what is actually there and find new ways to deal with things in ways that we never knew was possible. But you have to bother. You have to actually care and bother to see what's there. There are always more solutions than what you initially think. You have to, first, fight back against your brain's overly rational influences, and then from there, you can perhaps see the problem from different angles. Life is hard. Life will always be hard. But there is a lot more to it then meets the eye, and as we have seen inside of dreams, we have the ability to see beyond what only appears to be the obvious.

I whole-heartedly recommend Superliminal. Even at 2 hours, it is worth the $20 asking price. Enjoy.

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