Superliminal Review for PlayStation 4

I have recently had the pleasure of playing Superliminal, a puzzle game made by the folks over at Pillow Castle Games. This is a first-person game, which presents the player with puzzles and optical illusions meant to bend the mind and confuse the individual. To solve these puzzles, you are required to think outside the box! Right away, I am going to be completely up front about how much I love games like this. For anybody who was a fan of the Portal series by Valve or The Stanley Parable, and love that gritty sense of humor and style of game play will really love this game. There is an obvious element of hilarity here, as by moving objects up in the air and such you can make them huge. This never stopped amazing me and cracking me up while playing. The narrator as well, has a Portal-like character to it as they almost sound like Siri, for lack of a better description. There is also a creepy underlying factor to gameplay, that you discover by finding objects placed around the room.

In Superliminal, you play as a participant in a dream therapy program at the Pierce Institute. You wake up at 3am, or so you think, to find yourself stuck in a strange dream, where everything you perceive is reality. This is the main gameplay schtick. You are forced to play with objects in such a way to mess with their size and orientation and use them to solve the puzzles. Any object closer to you appears larger, so it becomes larger. The farther it goes away, the smaller you perceive it to be, so it remains that small. So on and so forth throughout the game. I really liked this concept as I found it to be original to the mind-bending puzzle game genre, as I found that many games coming after Portal had sort of the same kind of playstyle, which made the puzzles not challenging or interesting to think about. I never forget how I felt when playing Portal, how I thought about the science behind the portals and figuring out how it worked for the first time completely blew my mind. Superliminal really replicated that feeling for me, and I loved playing it for that.

The graphics here are not anything groundbreaking, which I find to be typical for the genre, but I found the scenes in Superliminal to be very carefully and beautifully designed. So, I must give props to the game designers for really making a beautiful game out of something so normal seeming. The game runs wonderfully on my PlayStation, and the music adds a lot to the game and is not distracting in the slightest. Another thing to note about this game is that it can be completed in entirety from about 2-4 hours, so one typical sitting for the average person playing video games. For some, this could be a downside, but with such huge backlogs I really enjoy games that are well thought out and can leave you with an impression after an evening spent with it. Not every game, in my opinion, should require hundreds of hours of gameplay out of you. Superliminal is just the perfect length: not too long, not too short. The story is given the perfect amount to breathe, and I found the message to be extremely powerful.

So, what are you waiting for! If you are familiar with the genre, this is a no brainer. Pick this up and play it! If you are not familiar with the genre, become acquainted with Superliminal! I love this genre of games and Superliminal ranks in my top 3 games played in this genre. It was fantastic!

10/10

Check Out the Superliminal Trailer:

For more information, please visit: http://www.pillowcastlegames.com/

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Anya Chudov

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I am a senior studying History at the University of Michigan. I've been playing video games since I was very young and around age 16 I had become entirely obsessed with the medium. I hope to one day work in the industry in any way I can.

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