It’s also one of “those” titles that people love to love, but will secretly never play. You cannot help but be impressed when you see the perspective manipulations for the first time – it’s good solid visual stuff – probably why their marketing campaign targeted YouTubers, visually in 60 seconds or so, it is all impressive and very likely a novel concept unseen before. This in part could be why you see the review scores it received. I speculate that the origin of this game was a curious tech demo someone was making in Unity, and they where “encouraged” to turn it into a game. Nor does it have any replay value at all, and herein lies our problem… Below The Surfaceįor a game with such a nifty mechanic, it’s incredibly shallow. The game took about 4 hours to play through (with plenty of community experimentation requests) so it’s not big. In terms of control, without doubt the most frustrating part is you cant look directly up or down – perhaps this is tied into the perspective nature of the puzzles, but it can make picking things up just that little more awkward. I can’t imagine building a movement engine where the physics can in part be manipulated by their perspective on the screen is the easiest thing to get right (and of course, being a programmer, experimenting with the engine was half the fun, and I will say that things only got a bit uncertain when taken to extremes – thankfully they include a “reset” to the last checkpoint). However, in the context of gameplay, all of this is OK. As such, its quite easy to bump into the corners of things, which is no big deal really, but did raise a few eyebrows as to my overall playing ability when I was streaming this! You can just about jump, and there is some attempt at a ledge grabbing mechanic, but it really feels random. It’s a bit like your player is made out of jelly (or Jell-O to my Yankee brethren), almost like the inertia of the movement is not quite right. Movement around the world is traditional FPS fayre, but it does feel clumsy. On the whole, the presentation is a polished experience and the world you inhabit is consistent with itself. The voice acting is very good and it does have some humour too. This review is spoiler free, so I wont divulge the plot other than to say it’s pretty familiar territory if you’ve played Portal or The Stanley Parable. And this mechanic is implemented pretty slickly too – believe it or not, it always felt intuitive what was going to be the consequences of my actions, so props to the designer in that regard! The phone in my visual field will remain the same size, but if it were placed far away, its huge relative to its environment, whereas if its placed even closer than my arms length, it shrinks. If I hold my phone at arms length, and place it in the world, it is scaled depending upon how far away I “drop” it. And it’s quite a neat device too! It doesn’t take long to wrap your head around. You are in a first person world where objects can be manipulated via perspective, and in doing so can be scaled, positioned and oriented in a manner to permit access to subsequent areas and puzzles. It would be easy for me to simply write reasons why it’s not that good, but as a developer of software, and a supporter of small games developers, I think it’s important to consider the context at the same time, which means that on the whole, Superliminal is not a bad “experience”, it’s purely a lackluster one, and it suffers from many of the problems most indie games seem to have. Ok ok ok, let’s actually review this game from several perspectives (it would want me too after all). And wow! According to the interwebz it’s awesome! Have I finally found a game that will be as inspired, thought provoking and puzzling as The Witness?
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