Superliminal (Nintendo Switch)
Official GBAtemp Review
Product Information:
- Release Date (NA): July 7, 2020
- Release Date (EU): July 7, 2020
- Publisher: Pillow Castle
- Developer: Pillow Castle
- Genres: FPS Puzzler
- Also For: Computer, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Game Features:
Imagine being trapped in a dream, a strange warped dream that seems real, but isn't quite fully grounded in reality. A stress-inducing repetition of illusion and dilemma that requires you to think outside the box to break the cycle and preserve your sanity. Thankfully there is Dr. Glenn Pierce in on hand with his extensive dream therapy techniques and positive reinforcement to steer you through to the end game: blissful awakedness. Superliminal challenges everything you think you know and funnels you through a series of interesting puzzles via the perspective of the first person.
When Portal arrived in 2007 my mind was blown wide open. Until then I had been playing Half-life, Counter-Strike and other FPS titles with the sole aim of survival and blasting everything in sight. Sure there were a few levers to pull and secret paths to discover, but nothing was truly taxing or intellectually deeper than the mere flip of a semi-hidden switch. Portal turned everything I knew on its head, and instead of spraying bullets I was firing off thoughts and attempting to outwit the outlandish puzzles as quickly and succinctly as possible. I no longer had to face off against armies of grunts, I now had to combat the theatre of war in my mind. I initially observed Museum of Simulation Technology as a tech demo several years ago, and I intently watched it flower into Superliminal on PC in 2019, and actually tweeted the Devs about Switch Port progress around 6 months before it was released. I was hooked on the simplistic premise long before I got to play anything at all.
Set across nine stages, Superliminal utilises several methods of camera trickery to fool the audience into believing an object is closer or further from you than it actually is. Forced perspective can be boiled down to the same effect as tourists aligning themselves with the Eiffel Tower to appear as though they are as tall as it in a photograph, or when you make a pinching motion with your index finger and thumb and frame the setting sun or moon with them to snap an image of you appearing to hold them in your fingertips. Superliminal utilises the Unity engine to make these illusions reality, and thanks to some cunningly simple ideas: there is a lot of fun to be had. For example, you can pick up a small 2-3 inch scale wedge of cheese, hold it aloft your head, drop it and it scales up to ten times the size, repeat as required and tilt it into a diagonal formation and bingo: you have a room scaled ramp! Another example is a huge immovable object in front of you such as an impressive marble sculpture, but move far enough away and line it up with the horizon and it appears titchy, so grab it while it's tiny and move it around with ease!
Controlling Superliminal is exceptionally simple, which gives it better playability. Effectively you use the analogue sticks to look and move around, and there is a jump and interact button; that's about it! Guided by a combination of the GLaDOS-like berating female A.I, and soothing vocal tones of Dr Glenn Pierce you either have a small sense of direction with virtually no sense of urgency, which makes for a pretty chilled gaming experience or you try to comply to the A.I's belittling critique of your problem solving and dreaming methods, and still somehow feel no sense of urgency.
Graphically Superliminal takes a lot of cues from Portal. Everything is clean, crisp and clinical until you "break out of bounds" and discover the subtext of the game; a grittier underbelly with smeared blood and warped ideology. You start in a hotel room with an alarm sounding, you leave only to find that each corridor is linked to the next puzzle, and the completed series of puzzle then leads to an elevator; rinse and repeat. I loved the simplicity of the visuals, they are just enough to give you the right look and feel of the environments, but the lighting effects or lack thereof are highlighted in sections where really crudely cast shadows that appear jagged as all heck across walls and floors, and absolutely no shadows appear under objects other than some generic all-encompassing light source. It's not terrible, but its slightly immersion-breaking and at times hideously unsightly.
Sound design is a mixed bag. The lift music style environmental ambience is repetitive, though it kind of fits with the dreamlike theme, and there are nice little touches such as the pitch of a metal object's clanking sound going down an octave or two as the object enlarges, and the pitch shifting upward as the object gets smaller. The characters that guide you via voice over and radio shows, really build no characterization and you're left feeling a little cheated that neither Glen nor the A.I really alter in emphasis or emotion from start to finish. Portal did this best in the way that GLaDOS got madder and madder throughout, but Superliminal emulates this at a relatively lukewarm level and never gives the characters any much-needed gravitas.
Puzzles tend to take on a couple of predefined forms, which I won't spoil, but I can't help but feel like there are too many samey ones and not enough meat in between. You seem to glide from puzzle to puzzle, sometimes via a tricky little sequence that gives you the same vibes as walking through the halls of mirrors or the glass maze at the funfair, but all too quickly you become wise to their methods and it immediately becomes a cakewalk. The "main puzzles" as I like to call them present themselves as large scale tasks that you have to overcome, you know where they are as they are proceeded by notably smaller tricks and red herrings, but these never really paint you into a corner or get you riled up until you get to the main puzzle for that stage. It's at that point that you in some way mess it up or have absolutely zero idea as to what you should be doing, and a little frustration kicks in. I found myself whizzing quite quickly through the levels finding my way through each "obstacle" rather quickly with the odd sensation of "whoa that's new" or "Well it didn't to THAT last time" sprinkling in some unexpected with the expectations you have when interacting with the objects at hand.
Given the nature of the naming of the stages you get a rather large clue as to the possible solution even before stepping foot into the level. With names like "Optical", "Cubism", "Clone", "Blackout" and "Whitespace" you have an idea what to expect, but a combination of very little hand-holding and funnelled environmental design, there aren't many ways you can go wrong, it just might take you a while to get there. The majority of the game feels like a walking simulation, where you wander around hallways and corridors blissfully hoping to stumble upon a way out via a more complicated puzzle to solve. Rarely though do you ever get truly stumped. All it takes is a little, perspective, a step back from the task and look at the entire picture, to regain sanity and find your focus.
The "Doll House" series of puzzles see you shrinking and enlarging a model of a house to gain access to various places depending on your scale, and I found this the most intriguing to mess about with. If you manipulate the house to appear relatively full size to your self, everything works as you would expect, however, if you make the house 2/3 scale and crouch to enter, you become this oddly scaled entity within the dolls house that is too big to correctly interact in the way the developers had hoped, and inversely if you make the house huge before entry you get this tiny little Land of the Giants style viewpoint where everything is massively oversized and impossible to use. It would have been great if the devs had accounted for this and allowed you to approach these sections in any scale you so chose to attack it at, with adaptable methods available regardless of your choices.
Throughout the game, you get a sense of the developers' humour. Loading bars fill their allotted space only to morph into a different shape and continue to load, or they comedically break through the end of the bar and carry on off the screen. Perhaps this is a way to mask the slightly lengthy loading times, either way its fun and interesting to see what is coming up next. The achievement system within the game (as Nintendo Switch still doesn't have a system-wide achievement system) are also amusing and fun to work through, but sometimes you may find it rather repetitious to do the same task more than a couple of times. I guess that in a way this mirrors the Groundhog day approach of the repeating day cycle your character has to work their way out of, but when viewed logically it perhaps only serves to extend your playtime enacting these things again and again just to unlock, and possibly brag about, the trophy at hand. As you trundle around you also find various whiteboards and environmental jokes to chortle on with, dead ends, red herrings and cheeky adverts in the elevators.
Overall I was a huge fan of Superliminal until I realised that It was all over far too quickly. I finished my first playthrough in under 90 minutes, which for the £16.99 pricetag doesn't seem like great value for money. The scope for a game like this is huge, but I never felt overwhelmed or able to fully explore all the options I wanted to. It's limited to focus you down on the task at hand, but to constrained to be compulsively replayable. If the developers had made it slightly more engaging via more sandbox "distractions" the game would be far more diverse in its intrigue, and more open to interpretation for methods to escape the labyrinth of the dreamers' mind. If we hope that this might possibly be the first game in a series as the forerunner to another game of this ilk: then I am incredibly excited to see where Pillow Castle takes us on a voyage of illusional discovery in their next games.
Verdict
- Easy to pick up and play
- 20 achievements to unlock
- Superb puzzles to unfurl
- Disappointingly short
- Very little replay value
- Lacklustre narrative
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