It’s not long before it seems like something has gone wrong with the study and your goal becomes a desperate escape from your own mind. And things only get wilder from there.Īll along the way, you’re told that you are a participant in some new form of sleep therapy, delving deeper into dreams in order to come out the other side a better person. It lets you shrink a normal-sized crate down to dollhouse-size in order to fit it through a gap, pressing a pressure plate in another room. It allows you to take a tiny rubber duck, hold it close to your face so it looks gigantic in the environment, and then send a giant rubber monstrosity crashing to the ground. That forced perspective concept is at the heart of Superliminal. Have you ever sat across from someone and squinted your eyes while holding up your thumb and forefinger so it looks like you’re squishing their tiny head? Have you ever held a small object in such a way that at just the right angle it looks massive? How about those lame tourism photos where everyone uses forced perspective to make it look like they’re holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa? No, not like that. “Perception is reality.” Not only was this statement part of the advertising, but it also comes up again and again throughout the game’s world. But to give you an idea, I’ll explain one of the opening puzzles and one of the game’s key mechanics… I hesitate to say much at all about what the puzzles entail, because so much of this game is about that initial novelty. The designers anticipate what you will do and what you will try, and their goal is to surprise and delight you with some wild optical illusions. Seriously though, most of the puzzles feel like being called up on stage from the audience of a magic show. When a puzzle is solved in Superliminal, it often feels like a magic trick. Superliminal doesn’t make you feel unintelligent, but the give and take between the player and the game is completely different. “Every time I solved a puzzle I felt like a genius,” was a common talking point. It was praised for how it empowered the player. In Portal, solving a puzzle felt like gears clicking into place. It is not without some charm and interest, and of its genre it is pleasant enough to play through.Superliminal is a Portal-esque puzzle game that completely reverses that game’s fundamental conceit. I am sure you can sense my frustration here, because after first half hour I was sure I had stumbled upon a classic game. Although the game is short, it ran out of ideas well before the end point, and I was rather wishing for it all to be over about three quarters of the way through. The game quickly becomes a Stanley Parable walking sim, which as good as that game is, is not something I signed up for by buying Superliminal. Puzzle solutions become more mundane less imaginative and the solutions become less intuitive, which is ironic given the idea of the game is looking at things with a different perspective. Unfortunately after the third "wake" things go dramatically downhill. Puzzle mechanics are different enough for it to pique interest. Unfortunately after the third "wake" Superliminal starts strong, very strong.
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