Superliminal game overview

I used to play a lot of video games, and nowadays not that many. But I have never written a game overview. I believe this game deserved one.

Superliminal is a puzzle game. It is very similar to Perspective, which I’d played a few years ago. I bought it and played it on my Switch. It took about 2 hours to finish it.

In the game you are constantly finding the way to exit doors. After playing it for a little bit, this triggered some calming state in myself, similar to meditation. Was the ambient music combined with finding the exit relaxing (even though it lead to another search for another exit)? Maybe it is just in our nature to find the way, like a bug that would always find the hole.

The game felt “scary” at times, but it is not a horror game. I am not sure where the calm came from, but maybe games like these can be used to treat stress and anxiety in the future.

The game talks about fear of failure. In our daily lives, we all have our framework of behaviour to keep ourselves consistent. I believe that is a direct consequence of fear of failure.

But the game does not have this consistency. Its world, compared to the real world, is unconstrained. In some levels, there is no $(x, y, z)$ position in space – the paradox is real when the player enters in a house within its own house. Another part is perspective – it is used in the game to alter objects’ size, whereas in the real world perspective is “read-only”. But, does such inconsistent world exist? Algorithmically it does, as the game exists 🙂

Constraints can be useful. Think of Sudoku for example. If its 9×9 board did not have any constraints, it would be too trivial to solve. At the same time, too much constraints can make it trivial as well. The right balance has to be achieved.

The game ends by congratulating us with the famous saying “outside the box thinker”. This reminded me how powerful is the tool that we have in our heads.