You liked Portal? You will love Superliminal. You like puzzle games? Again, this game might be for you. Like games that break physics in fun ways? This might be something you’d like.
For some reason, you have decided to try a new sleep therapy that lets you lucid dream to mental health. That’s the theory, anyway. Something goes wrong and you find yourself stuck inside your own mind while, in the real world, the sleep doctor (a real doctor who went to doctor school, the AI reminds you) tries to guide you out through messages communicated to you, in your dream, via tape recorders.
Superliminal plays with your sense of perspective. Large things can look small in the distance; small things can look large up close. You can play with distance and perspective to make things larger or smaller, pull things out of a picture, make the far side of a door larger than the near side so that you get larger (or smaller) when you pass through, and so on.
Through it all, the AI that is your intermediary between the real world and your lucid dream is commenting on your pathetic attempts to evade the foolproof protocols that should have had you coming awake ages ago if you weren’t quite so obstinate.
The game is short; I finished it in under two hours, and now that I know the puzzles, I could finish much faster. There was only one puzzle I had to find help for; most, I figured out in a few minutes. They were all pretty clever and played with reality more and more as I played through the game’s nine chapters, with a lot of humor and many secrets to encourage replays.
Finishing the game opens up two new modes: a challenge mode and a director’s commentary mode, neither of which I have played yet.
I played for “free” as it was part of the Playstation Plus subscription for me. It was well worth the price (free). It is available for every console, and Steam.
