Superliminal (Xbox Series X)

In real life when you view a far off object, you understand that it looks smaller because of the distance. It may look like a distant building could easily be picked up between your fingers, but it’s just a matter of perspective, and should you approach it, you’ll find it getting larger and larger until you can appreciate its actual size. In Superliminal though, were you to try and reach out and grab that building, it would be just as small as it appeared, and if you were to move it elsewhere and set it down, you can alter its size relative to your perspective.

 

Much of the first-person puzzle game Superliminal is based around optical illusions and visual trickery, with the relationship between size and distance being its most common trick. You can pick up eligible objects no matter where they are and carry them no matter the size, but what’s more important is where you set them down after. Grab a nearby small object and drop it at the other end of the room and you’ll find as you approach it is now gigantic and the same can work in reverse if there are some large objects you need to reduce down in size. It is a nifty bit of visual trickery and more intuitive than it might sound after the game’s early rooms ensure you understand it, but the breadth of puzzles the game concocts for this central mechanic feels a little weak. A good deal of puzzles just involve making an object much larger to serve as a platform you can jump up onto or changing its size so it can weigh down a switch. Actually utilizing the perspective adjustment isn’t too difficult either, it easy to think of it as just stretching an object until you have the ideal dimensions you need to continue.

Luckily, despite this being the fundamental mechanic at Superliminal’s heart, it isn’t the only one it relies on. There are many different sections of this short adventure where you travel through the interior building spaces and find new and unusual illusions to engage with. Perspective is still often a key element but not always in relation to distance. You might need to look at things from the right angle so that some paint on the wall can form an object you can grab while at other times those same 3D objects might reveal themselves just to be a trick of environmental design, the player able to continue once they realize the illusion at play. Not trusting your eyes becomes more and more common as deceptive visuals must be worked around and there are quite a few concepts that only ever get embraced in a single room since the whole challenge is even realizing how they work. The size shifting mechanic that makes up the game’s fundamental systems does see occasional creative iteration like needing to change the size of doorways so you shift in size as you pass through or helping an object’s secondary trait like the light it emits become more or less effective. It also engages in interesting ways with other briefly explored systems like cloning objects with just a touch, but it can still feel like Superliminal is worried you won’t be able to wrap your head around more complex interactions between its mechanics and visual tricks, leading to many solutions being one note in rooms that often have few variables.

 

Superliminal doesn’t fail as a tour of nifty visual trickery though, the kind of interaction you can only experience in video games where physics are whatever the code says they are rather than having to obey any laws of reality. While the puzzle design doesn’t feel consistently ambitious, Superliminal does have fun sending you through areas with quick and entertaining visual tricks to appreciate, the consistent visual novelty making it hard to grow bored. Most of the game does take place inside what appears to be a large and eerily empty hotel, the player the only person present and the design of the building getting less and less normal the longer you spend in it. It deliberately averts giving the player a sense of space as hallways don’t always logically take you where they should and more and more rooms that seem impossible crop up, but that’s partly because the reality behind the surreality in Superliminal is that the entire game takes place within a dream as revealed in the opening with an advertisement.

SomnaSculpt is a form of experimental technology that allows for people to work through their issues within a dream world, but after performing a brief orientation that helps you get used to some of the dream logic at play, it seems your therapy goes awry. While at first an automated voice instructs you on what to do, soon it mostly just starts reiterating in new and mildly amusing ways how your dream therapy is currently not going to plan. There is very little story in Superliminal beyond the occasional check-in from that voice to say that things still are functioning incorrectly, although eventually you do start hearing the voice of Dr. Pierce, the developer of SomnaSculpt who soon adds his own continued concerns over how your therapy is going. With so much of the dialogue concerning this it does feel a bit odd when Superliminal starts veering towards the philosophical later down the line and thus it doesn’t land quite so well since the game in total can end rather quickly if you don’t get held up on any optical illusions for too long. The messages it tries to convey aren’t exactly flawed, but it feels like the context and build-up aren’t really there to make it feel like it constructed a reasonable theme, especially since Superliminal in generally pursues the next fun idea rather than trying to have coherent connections or consistent puzzle formats.

 

An unlockable mode does exist to try and make Superliminal a little tougher, the challenge mode imposing some limits on you as you play through familiar rooms once again. You’ll only be allowed to do things like grab objects or jump so many times, requiring you to sometimes think more deeply about what objects are on hand, but at the same time, the area design that makes it easy to move through Superliminal at a brisk pace also means there isn’t too much room for experimentation. There are rarely too many objects to interact with in a space since there is often one expected solution, and usually grabbing objects multiple times is just for fine-tuning the size shift rather than it being some limit on the amount of tools you can utilize to solve a puzzle. The difficulty in challenge mode thus rises and falls based on if the room even has much room for alternate solutions and it is a shame that you will already have solved every room before in the story. It’s not quite what Superliminal needed to provide a more riveting challenge, but it was perhaps wiser that Superliminal didn’t abandon its current approach, a lightly interactive museum of illusions likely to intrigue a wider range of players than a brain-bending series of conundrums that would scare off all but the most devoted puzzle solvers.

THE VERDICT: Superliminal works best for a player who goes in eager to see visual trickery and optical illusions rather than one looking for substantial puzzles. The mechanics at play are meant to fascinate you conceptually but their implementation will often boil down to a simple problem quickly solved, especially in regards to the perspective tricks involving growing and shrinking objects just to hop up to higher locations. The barely present narrative feels like it could have been a humorous or meaningful way to string things together, but instead it tells repetitive jokes before rushing to overlay deeper meaning over everything as you approach the finale. Being a short experience it can still maintain your interest up to the end with a consistent string of new ways it can warp reality, but Superliminal is more a game to be observed rather than one with fulfilling trials to overcome or a deep narrative to tie together its surreal concepts.

 

And so, I give Superliminal for Xbox Series X…

An OKAY rating. Perhaps the heart of why Superliminal’s puzzles feel a bit basic is that they are mechanic showcases first and trials second. Stretching an object’s proportions is often the solution and as such it’s fairly easy to figure things out once you’ve adjusted your brain a bit to accommodate the latest optical illusion at play. Had more puzzles involved multiple steps then Superliminal could potentially provide more gratification in clearing a room. There’s still the brief enjoyment in an epiphany as the logic clicks in your head, and as mentioned earlier perhaps there was a fear that a complex puzzle would be too hard to complete considering that some mechanics and elements of this game world are deliberately inconsistent and subverted for the sake of providing frequent surprises and situational novelty. In some ways the puzzle solving can almost get in the way if it doesn’t come together well as you’re less interested in finishing the current room as you are seeing what lies ahead. While it was wise to keep things condensed and not clutter areas to ensure speedy forward progress, it also lessens the impact of individual illusions. The best and most memorable moments in Superliminal are often when it pulls back the curtain on a longer illusion or requires a more inspired bit of interaction from the player than just shifting the size of objects, so potentially the game could have rearranged itself to build you up to larger unique interactions and then let you cool off with simpler illusions before the next big tent pole puzzle. At present it is still a nifty tour of a world where logic keeps shifting in intriguing ways, but with the weak story elements failing to invest you more deeply in it, it does still feel like at most you’re going to get a series of impressive sights that don’t feel too connected to your character or puzzle solving approach.

 

Superliminal is the kind of game that looks good in a GIF or video because it is so heavily devoted to the quick subversion of your expectations about reality. There is some fun to be found in just looking at an optical illusion and trying to see through it’s strangeness and that’s what helps Superliminal stay lively enough that you won’t likely quit once you start playing, but there’s not much engagement involved in looking an optical illusion besides the brief reaction to the sight and perhaps hearing how it works after. Superliminal is a showcase of how video games can play with a player’s perception of a virtual world first and a puzzle game as an afterthought, but it is at least able to inspire enough curiosity that it won’t disappoint with the strange sights it constructed quite well.