Superliminal review

Puzzles that will change your idea of the genre...

Among the many puzzles there are games that you can evaluate even without being a fan of this genre. There are also projects that fascinate and capture regardless of genre. The developers of Superliminal somehow managed to combine both...

Superliminal will have to be compared with two legendary games in a similar genre - Portal and The Stanley Parable , mainly because of the storytelling system. Firstly, a similar style of presentation is used: several voice-overs are the only sources of the plot. In our case, this is an artificial intelligence with a pleasant female voice in the loudspeakers of the complex, as well as Dr. Pierce, who transmits his messages through tape recorders scattered everywhere and desperately believes that the protagonist can be pulled out of the world of dreams. Secondly, with the presence of interesting puzzles, the game pays tribute to the above two projects, but the developers of Superliminal still managed to create and implement new puzzles into the project, the complexity of which fans of the genre did not even suspect.

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Superliminal is an action-adventure story-driven adventure game from a first-person perspective. As befits such projects, the first puzzles are as simple as possible: you need to move the blocks, increasing or decreasing them depending on the perspective. You can pick up an object at any distance and then zoom in or out. In the first case, its size relative to the entire room will increase, in the second, on the contrary, it will decrease. After choosing the right size for the block, lower it to the floor so that it retains its shape. There is nothing complicated in this mechanic, and you will see it very quickly.

The setting of the game is reminiscent of the well-known film Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

The hero plunges into a lucid dream, but due to a number of technical errors in the program, he is trapped and cannot wake up on his own. After the next alarm signal, the protagonist wakes up in his room over and over again, hoping that the nightmare is finally over. But as soon as he walks a few meters along the familiar corridor, the space around him changes, and he again finds himself in another room with riddles. The hero is nothingIt is figured out how to move into the depths of a dream, simultaneously solving various puzzles, which, by the way, become more difficult and inventive with each new level.

Recall at least the Riddler's charades from the Batman: Arkham games, where in one of these puzzles it was necessary to correctly position a dot on the wall of the building so that the result was a "question mark". Superliminal uses a similar system: by combining several cubes, you can transfer the resulting cube into a three-dimensional dimension. Such a system undoubtedly makes the gameplay more difficult and interesting, even though the vast majority of elements were borrowed from the Portal series.

Take, for example, notes of humor from artificial intelligence or Dr. Pierce. We have already seen this in the second part of Portal. But, as with its predecessor, many of these comments are also important here: some fill in the gaps in the story, others point to the correct solution to the next puzzle. For the entire passage, we came across only a few puzzles that, in our opinion, were not appropriate. Their decision?? and was not related to the perspective, and the voiceovers silently watched the many futile attempts to find the right path.

The passage of Superliminal in total takes 2-3 hours of game time, depending on how actively you use the guides. With each new level, the game becomes more surreal, so it is unlikely that any of you will be able to fully understand the plot. And this is completely unnecessary: the game captivates with unique perspective-based puzzles, and at the end the player will be rewarded with a surprisingly important message. The message of the developers at the end of the game fully explains their motives :