Your support enables us to continue to provide this type of content and more. If you want to contribute to our coverage of Chicago’s video game scene (and more) please consider becoming a patron. We are the only publication in Chicago that regularly reviews video games, and we cover lots of local Chicago-based events and more. If you like the video game, tabletop, or other technology content that Third Coast Review has to offer, consider donating to our Patreon. If you like puzzle games, Superliminal is a safe bet. It has a short running time, but there were so many amusingly clever moments in those few hours I played to make it worth it. Using perspective as a puzzle mechanic isn’t unique to Superliminal, but it’s one of the only games I’ve played that leans on it throughout, and probably the most fun I’ve had while playing such a game. That said, what’s there is extremely well done. As with most puzzle games, you may get stuck and spend more time with it, but there isn’t a whole lot of content. I was able to play through Superliminal in a single sitting-just over two and a half hours. Thinking it was a solution, I spent way too long slow walking around until I discovered it was just a bug.īesides the bug I ran into, my biggest complaint is its short length. There was one puzzle that I got stuck on in the worst way-without giving too much away, I shrunk myself down and fell between the cracks of a level. That being said, there were a few headscratchers, and I did get stuck for a little while. I don’t know if I’m just particularly adept at finding the solutions to these types of puzzles, or if they really were that easy. I only got stumped by the puzzles a few times. And while puzzles seem to be thematically similar, I often found myself not knowing what to expect even within the same set of puzzles.Īs clever as the puzzles are, they aren’t the most challenging I’ve come across. Things get really mind bending when you get the chance to place doorways within doorways. Doorways can be removed from the wall in some puzzles, and placed in other locations-or even made smaller or bigger, to increase or decrease the player’s size as well. Objects can become pictures, pictures can become objects.

If you find yourself in a dark hallway with no way through on both ends, the answer may be walking through the dark walls on the side-that aren’t walls after all. Superliminal also uses light and shadow, and negative space in clever ways to make puzzles. There’s more to perspective than objects getting larger and smaller. Superliminal takes the idea of perspective puzzles to all of their extremes in some of the best ways. But it’s more than just making a small box big to get to a higher step-though there’s plenty of that. If you see a doorway up a wall you can’t access, but there’s a box in the room, you can place that box in a spot that makes it larger than it was, and now you can pick up the larger box. That’s the basis for most of the puzzles in Superliminal. Did you ever look at a far object, like the moon, and pretend to crush it with your fingers? Well, imagine if you could pluck that moon out of the sky, and roll it like a marble.

Games like superliminal