Superliminal

Developed by Pillow Castle

Played on PC via Xbox Game Pass

The Skinny:  A delightful if short puzzle game that puts your spacial reasoning and perspective to the test!

Framed as a session of lucid dreaming therapy, 2019’s Superliminal from developer Pillow Castle is a surprising and delightful little gem of a first person puzzle game. The game is set from a first person perspective, much like Valve’s smash hit Portal, and players must navigate puzzle rooms and solve perspective challenges in order to progress to each level’s exit. The primary mechanic revolves around perspective and object manipulation. Players can pick up objects and use the surroundings and changes in perspective to manipulate them by changing their size or shape. For example, players can pick up a block from a table, and by placing it correctly in the environment, change its size. This size change is neat, but can be a bit tricky to correctly implement. I found myself dancing with objects in order to get them to be the right size, often having them shrink on my with a careless push of the mouse.


Being set in a sort of a mad science experiment turned strip mall therapy office, the game wears its Portal inspiration on its sleeve, with a snarky AI, enigmatic voice messages from the technology’s developer, and ominous whiteboard messages. The writing is never quite as sharp or as funny as Portal, but it is clever, and it doesn’t get quite as cynical either. Objects and locations are fun and surprising, and the puzzles were tricky without being too frustrating.


Clocking in at just a couple of hours, Superliminal doesn’t really have too much meat on its bones beyond the couple hours of single-player campaign. But what it does provide is fun and engaging. It is the perfect game to while away a winter afternoon with a mug of something warm nearby.
Superliminal is available as a download for PC, Xbox, Playstation network, and Nintendo Switch.