Portal was also technically sound, and while Superliminal is mostly pretty good from a technical perspective, I did encounter some issues. This is especially true because the game loves to change the rules in subtle ways and try to encourage non-linear thinking, which means that there are a lot of potential actions and solutions at any given time. That’s not a huge issue for a simple puzzle where you immediately intuit the solution, but when you need to try different things and iterate it can quickly get annoying. Sometimes, however, the game reads the perspective differently than you do and you might end up accidentally shrinking the cheese, or not changing its size at all, or dropping it so that it gets stuck temporarily etc… Combine this with the difficulty of positioning something where you need it without changing its size and everything feels fiddly and slightly laborious to do. Even optimally this might take 20-30 seconds because you have to go through multiple cycles of holding the cheese up and dropping it to increase its size, and then running over to its new location (since you won’t be dropping it on your head most of the time) to pick it up and do it again. Take a simple idea like increasing the size of a wedge of cheese until it’s large enough to function as a ramp so you can reach a high up doorway. Superliminal is a much slower game, both in the speed your character moves and also in how long it takes to try puzzle solutions. Sometimes you’d have to do a little platforming or wait for the level elements to align themselves, but that rarely took more than a couple seconds. Because you were using a gun you could try different portal placements, or fix errant shots, very quickly. One of the underappreciated aspects of Portal was how quickly you could iterate when trying different puzzle solutions. While the perspective gameplay in Superliminal can be fun, and is certainly novel, the cracks soon start to show and make you appreciate just how brilliant Portal’s game design actually was. The game does a good job of switching up its mechanics both within and between the levels. Your ultimate objective in each level is to move through the rooms until you get to an elevator. In later areas you might find objects that fall apart or clone themselves when you try to grab them. Or you might have to create a series of stairs and ramps out of basic objects like sugar cubes and wedges of cheese by resizing them. For example you might see the image of part of an object painted on a wall and have to line it up with other parts on other surfaces to make the object solid so you can grab it. It’s a neat enough gimmick and there are lots of variations even early on. You can also do things like holding an object so that it looks like it’s on top of something that’s too high for you to reach, and then release the object to have it stay in that position. At its most basic you can shrink objects or increase their size by holding an object and either moving close to a wall to make them look smaller or holding them up towards the ceiling and making them look further away, which makes them larger after you drop them. This allows you to manipulate them in the environment through perspective. The basic premise is that you can grab objects telekinetically (the game doesn’t say this directly but you can’t see your hand, but it’s a dream so whatever) and they stay the same size on your screen. She’s chipper and friendly but with a brittle, acerbic, undertone and she is quick to blame you when things inevitably go wrong. You’re oriented to the game by a disembodied voice that’s clearly modeled after GLaDOS. The visuals are clean and pleasant, though, even if they aren't exactly cutting edge. Superliminal looks like a VR game but it's not. The institute mostly consists of functional rooms that look like offices or workshops or concrete utility hallways and the test galleries that mostly look like museum installations all bright lighting and large open spaces. This game isn’t interested in exploring personal stories or trauma or anything like that it’s about perspective. You’re participating in some kind of dream therapy called SomnaSculpt, where you go through a lucid dream experience in order to learn about yourself or deal with some kind of psychological block. You play in the first person perspective of an unnamed character who has visited a psychological institute for unspecified reasons. Superliminal wants to be Portal and doesn’t hide it at all.
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