We recently played multiple games that focused on perspectives – not those of a professional career, but those that sometimes play tricks with your own eyes. We started with “Superliminal” – a game in which you have to solve various puzzles using only basic physical principles and changing your perspective. Let’s talk about how I liked it.

I’m a big fan of puzzle games, but my experience has mainly been with those that give you an inventory full of strange objects that you then have to use more or less logically to find your way out of a (mostly) completely self-inflicted misery. So I wasn’t entirely sure if this game would appeal to me – no inventory at all, just simple interactions with the environment and the main attraction should be optical illusions? On first sight, I wasn’t convinced.

The first few minutes of the game taught me the basics – apart from running, jumping and picking up objects (only one at a time), there wasn’t much to the controls. Things only got more interesting when we were introduced to perspective: an object is always held about an arm’s length in front of you, but its size changes when you let go, depending on the reference point. If I stand far from a table and the object in my hand seems larger, it stays that size when I let go – if I stand close to a wall and it seems very small, it stays very small when I let go.

Armed with this admittedly interesting game mechanic, we set off. I don’t want to go into too much detail about the story because it’s hard not to spoil anything – it’s definitely about therapy. Even though no particularly serious trigger topics are directly addressed, you should have a certain level of mental stability if you want to play this game – then it’s definitely an interesting experience to get involved in; I was definitely very impressed afterwards.

But back to the gameplay. We walk through different rooms in a building and are repeatedly thrown off track or simply confused by perspective tricks. However, this was rarely frustrating; once or twice I was surprised and thrilled by how confused I was by the first impression – I found it impressive that the game was able to take advantage of this so well.

The puzzles were also very well and thoughtfully designed. While the first puzzles in particular played relatively obviously with the size of the objects, things got trickier in the later ones – I don’t want to spoil anything, but if you deal with them intensively you will come up with solutions that open your eyes. Many puzzles were very obscure at first, and once you got to the solution after a bit of trial and error, you couldn’t not see it anymore – you were more likely to wonder why it took you so long to figure it out when it was so obvious.

I would like to go into some specific things at this point, but I don’t want to rob anyone of the experience that this game gave me. One or two puzzles really frustrated me, but this frustration was always rewarded (perhaps after one or two tips from the chat) with an often simple, but always ingenious solution. In my opinion, you should have played it yourself, otherwise the feeling just doesn’t really come across.

The game’s absolutely brilliant sound design definitely helped with that experience as well. While there were one or two levels towards the end where the music made me nervous, the rest of the time the selection was very appropriate. The music and effects weren’t intrusive, but without them something would definitely have been missing – that’s exactly how it should be.

The remaining technical aspects were nothing special, but solid. The controls always worked perfectly (even if I would have liked to claim otherwise after one or two gameplay errors), we had no bugs or crashes and the graphics were simple but appropriate. Only the frame rate suffered in one place or another and slipped below the mark of what you notice – unfortunately that spoiled the immersion in one place or another. Overall, however, it wasn’t dramatic.

I think my conclusion can be derived relatively easily from the rest of the article: I love the game! It kept me excited and occupied for much longer than the actual playing time, and during that time it made my head spin a few times. It didn’t just rest itself on the ingenious puzzles, but also created a very deep story at the same time – in my opinion, this game couldn’t have been better. It definitely gets a recommendation from me – with the mentioned caveat that you should be in a stable mental state.

What do you think of the game? Was it exciting to watch and puzzle along? Do you still want to play it yourself or have you already done so? Feel free to join the discussion on Discord!