Superliminal It’s all a matter of perspective

Game On

It’s all a matter of perspective

BY JENNIFER HARRISON

My opinions on computer gaming and some of my favorite games. Playing games on the home computer since the days of the trash 80. I love indie, open-world, unique, puzzle, and resource games. The cake is a lie.

In the game Superliminal, by Pillow Castle Games, you’re helping Dr. Glenn Pierce test its SomnaSculpt technology by going through a dream therapy program.

You wake up in a generic hotel room with a classic digital clock. At first, things are pretty normal. You’ll find that you can pick up objects across the room that appear small in perspective, but when you pick up an object and bring it closer to you, it grows to a ridiculous size. Or you can pick up an item close to you and cause it to shrink by placing it further away.

The premise of the game is that you’re in a dream therapy session, and this is part of the therapy – a series of puzzles that can be completed by using optical illusions and forced perspective. Dr. Pierce communicates with you via a series of radios, communicating your progress, and creating a narrative for the story.

Some of the puzzles can be solved by picking up objects and making them larger, so that you can get on top of them. Some puzzles must be solved by finding the right perspective in a two-dimensional image. Once the image is complete, the object can be picked up to solve the next puzzle.

Things start to get weird when the player fails to wake up and ends up back in the dreamworld, waking up inside the generic hotel room with the digital clock again. Dr. Pierce tells you through the radio that they have lost track of where you are in the simulation.

Eventually, the AI that is running the dream therapy session tells you that you must initiate an “Explosive Mental Overload” to trigger the “Emergency Exit Protocol” and escape the dreamworld. However, the attempt fails, and the player is trapped in the dreamworld. Eventually, you’ll complete the puzzles and escape, returning to the room you started in and waking up.

All in all, it’s definitely a surreal experience, and will make you feel as if there’s something really creepy about these liminal spaces that you’re in. A liminal space is an area that you usually see with people, that for some reason is empty. It’s very much like being in an area of a hotel convention center where you took the wrong turn while looking for the bathroom. No matter how many hallways you walk down, you can never find the door that leads to the outside. Fortunately, there’s no Backrooms monster to scare you in this game, it’s just a series of visual puzzles.

Superliminal was developed by Albert Shih, and his team with Pillow Castle Games, many of whom were recruited from the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. When those students graduated, he had to hire more people to finish the job. It was released on Steam on Nov. 5, 2020. Five additional ‘Group Therapy’ maps and a cooperative mode were available as a free update in December 2021.

Shih’s goal was to make a first-person game that was just ‘moving cubes around.’ He was inspired by the tourist photos of people pretending to hold up the Tower of Pisa. Shih wanted an open world concept with several solutions to the puzzles, so that players could think creatively about solving problems.

“Superliminal is a first-person puzzle game based on forced perspective and optical illusions. Puzzles in this game give you a sense of the unexpected. Players need to change their perspective and think outside the box to wake up from the dream.”

Superliminal has been generally enjoyed by players with its unique gameplay, the only complaint being that the game is too short. It was a finalist for “Most Innovative Gameplay” on Steam in 2020. Available on SteamOS for Mac and PC for $19.99.

screenshot courtesy Pillow Castle Games

A long hotel hallway with some objects that are oddly large.