Superliminal is a perspective-bending puzzle game from developer Pillow Castle that traps you in a surreal dream therapy session. Superliminal is an exercise in abstract thinking as you navigate the recesses of your own mind and manipulate objects that fit in your pocket one moment and tower over you the next—depending on how you look at them.
And there's more to it than making a chess piece huge so it can weigh down a floor switch or using an enormous cheese wedge as a ramp. Superliminal plays with size—sometimes your own size size as well—but also with space, light, and darkness.
Here are some gifs from Fraser and I that will bend your mind into some new shapes.
Dice aren't for rolling in Superliminal, but they make for great steps...
...until they suddenly don't. Come on, dice, I thought we had an understanding.
And dice aren't the only things misbehaving. Just when you think you've got Superliminal figured out, things stop working the way they used to. Et tu, doors?
I wish I could make my real house bigger by just picking it up and dropping it. Of course, make it too big and you'll run into problems.
Superliminal grows more abstract the deeper you dream, and there are a number of puzzles that play with black and white, light and shadow.
Come on, Superliminal. Now you're not even being fair.
Superliminal isn't terribly long or all that difficult—I finished it in about 90 minutes. There are some clever concepts in it, and some good puzzles that make you feel pretty darn smart for figuring them out. It's a bit of The Stanley Parable and a smidge of Portal though it doesn't reach the heights of either. The concepts of Superliminal are great, but the price of changing directions and expectations quickly means it never really builds on any one particular puzzle system.
I also managed to break it once or twice by experimenting a little too freely, which is disappointing. At least there's an option for quickly resetting a checkpoint or starting a level over if you muck things up too much while messing around. Superliminal is out now on Steam, the Epic Game Store, and GOG.
