Superliminal was a game that interested me for a long time and I finally decided to play it. Superliminal is a really impressive game, like The Stanley Parable, there is a voice talking to us in the background, but unlike The Stanley Parable, this voice does not tell us what we need to do, but always gives us tips. The subject covered in the game can also be called a sleep experiment or dream therapy. I did not understand the game very well because it is a very very different and completely dizzying game.
When you start Superliminal, a cinematic starts and an advertisement for Pierce Institute, which is affiliated with the Sleep Clinic called Somnasculpt, plays on the TV while you are in bed. From the Somnasculpt Sleep Clinic, Dr. Glenn Pierce is a doctor who performs our dream therapy and constantly communicates with us via small tape recorders in the rooms we enter and gives us tips on how to get out.
Our aim in the game is to get out of the dream, the game is played with standard FPS game controls (i.e. W-A-S-D and mouse). Once the game starts, all we have to do is move forward and look for clickable objects. When we find a clickable object, we can change the size of the object by adjusting our perspective. For example, when we first start the game, huge chess pieces appear in front of us. If we click on these chess pieces, bring them closer to the wall or the ground and leave them on the floor near us, they can become smaller and even microscopic.
If you want to enlarge small objects, we need to leave the object we clicked from above and away from ourselves. By changing the sizes and positions of the objects, we can reach the doors and sections that we cannot reach with the help of these objects. Actually, the game is like a combination of Portal + Stanley Parable, but in addition, this game is full of very complex puzzles that you can progress with your own perspective.
Superliminal seems like an easy game at first, a game that really pleases and surprises those who play with puzzles with simple but mind-blowing solutions. In the first levels, we can take the objects in our hands and go through the doors and unlock new levels, but the game does not allow this in the next levels.
The game prevents us from inserting any objects in our hands while passing through the new doors, but if we look carefully at these rooms, we can see that there is no ceiling in the room and that we can enlarge these objects and insert them into the room through the space above. This was the first thing that surprised me because it was the first time I encountered this kind of game mechanic. Even though I watched a few gameplay videos about Superliminal, I spent a few minutes wandering around the room trying to beat the level.
Every object you can think of in the game can be clickable, so be sure to carefully examine the rooms while playing Superliminal. Sometimes the door in front of you, sometimes the exit sign, or even an object drawn as an illusion from perspective, can turn into a real object and become clickable when approached from the right perspective. These are really amazing and impressive add-ons, although I didn't like the story of the game, I was really satisfied with the gameplay and the creativity of the puzzles.
The puzzles in the rooms are usually like this: There is a closed door in front of you and a big button in the middle of the room. When you hover over this button, the door opens, but when you move forward to pass through the open door, the door closes again because you are away from the button. To pass through the door, you have to drop an object on the button in the middle of the room. This object may be a secret object in the room, you may need to bring an object from the previous rooms into this room, usually the puzzles continue in this way.
While walking in the rooms according to the story in the game, a peaceful and beautiful piano is played in the background, but when we deviate from the rooms according to the story and enter the dark cellars, the piano music playing in the background suddenly stops and you only hear the voice of Dr. Glenn Pierce speaking from the tapes in front of you. I remember feeling very tense in these levels because while you are walking through beautifully designed nice rooms accompanied by a very calm piano, your path suddenly falls into an interesting labyrinth cellar filled with dark and iron piles, and the sweet music in the background suddenly stops.
The game warns us when we deviate into such rooms and tells us to follow the emergency exit signs, but if we don't, the game gets even more interesting. Those who have read my previous game reviews know that in such open-ended games, I always try to reach different endings and different levels by doing the opposite of the game instructions. I did that in Superliminal as well and got to the really scary and creepy sections. I continued to play in the dark, endless cellars whose floors and doors were stained with blood. I could play comfortably because there was no die and restart or checkpoint system in the game because alternative hints were added for each level in Superliminal.
When you reach the end of each level, a small loading screen comes up and you wake up in your bedroom. Every time you wake up, your alarm goes off and the alarm clock is 1 hour ahead each time, which shows that we are progressing in the game. The corridor and other rooms of the house change when we go out of our bedroom in each level.
Actually it is not quite right to call it home because when we leave the bedroom, the other rooms are dark cellars and the doors of these cellars usually open to beautifully designed normal rooms with light, when we enter these rooms, the peaceful piano music starts again. This music really relaxes me.
In the later levels of the game, Dr. Glenn Pierce and a staff from the institute says that our psychology is broken and that we need to wake up from this dream urgently and tells us that we need to get on the elevator, but none of this works and we completely lose our sense of time and perspective when we are in the dream and then a new game mechanic is added to the game.
We can no longer pick up objects, instead, when we click on the object, the objects multiply. The exit of the rooms we entered leads to the rooms we entered again, and the puzzles turn into paradoxes and get harder and harder. Our mouse control is changing and we can't move left and right, we can't stay in balance. These levels really made my head spin, I remember feeling nauseous.
Superliminal is a really weird game. It's full of intriguing, terrifying, and mind-blowingly surprising puzzles. If you haven't played this game yet, I definitely recommend you to play it, you will have an excellent experience that you will not regret.
Last Words
Thank you so much for reading my Superliminal review! I hope you enjoyed the game and my review. :)