Superliminal wants to be Portal and doesn’t hide it at all. You play in the first person perspective of an unnamed character who has visited a psychological institute for unspecified reasons. You’re participating in some kind of dream therapy called SomnaSculpt, where you go through a lucid dream experience in order to learn about yourself or deal with some kind of psychological block. This game isn’t interested in exploring personal stories or trauma or anything like that; it’s about perspective. Quite literally. The institute mostly consists of functional rooms that look like offices or workshops or concrete utility hallways and the test galleries that mostly look like museum installations; all bright lighting and large open spaces.

You’re oriented to the game by a disembodied voice that’s clearly modeled after GLaDOS. She’s chipper and friendly but with a brittle, acerbic, undertone and she is quick to blame you when things inevitably go wrong. The basic premise is that you can grab objects telekinetically (the game doesn’t say this directly but you can’t see your hand, but it’s a dream so whatever) and they stay the same size on your screen. This allows you to manipulate them in the environment through perspective. At its most basic you can shrink objects or increase their size by holding an object and either moving close to a wall to make them look smaller or holding them up towards the ceiling and making them look further away, which makes them larger after you drop them. You can also do things like holding an object so that it looks like it’s on top of something that’s too high for you to reach, and then release the object to have it stay in that position. It’s a neat enough gimmick and there are lots of variations even early on. For example you might see the image of part of an object painted on a wall and have to line it up with other parts on other surfaces to make the object solid so you can grab it. Or you might have to create a series of stairs and ramps out of basic objects like sugar cubes and wedges of cheese by resizing them. In later areas you might find objects that fall apart or clone themselves when you try to grab them. Your ultimate objective in each level is to move through the rooms until you get to an elevator. The game does a good job of switching up its mechanics both within and between the levels.

While the perspective gameplay in Superliminal can be fun, and is certainly novel, the cracks soon start to show and make you appreciate just how brilliant Portal’s game design actually was. One of the underappreciated aspects of Portal was how quickly you could iterate when trying different puzzle solutions. Because you were using a gun you could try different portal placements, or fix errant shots, very quickly. Sometimes you’d have to do a little platforming or wait for the level elements to align themselves, but that rarely took more than a couple seconds. Superliminal is a much slower game, both in the speed your character moves and also in how long it takes to try puzzle solutions. Take a simple idea like increasing the size of a wedge of cheese until it’s large enough to function as a ramp so you can reach a high up doorway. Even optimally this might take 20-30 seconds because you have to go through multiple cycles of holding the cheese up and dropping it to increase its size, and then running over to its new location (since you won’t be dropping it on your head most of the time) to pick it up and do it again. Sometimes, however, the game reads the perspective differently than you do and you might end up accidentally shrinking the cheese, or not changing its size at all, or dropping it so that it gets stuck temporarily etc… Combine this with the difficulty of positioning something where you need it without changing its size and everything feels fiddly and slightly laborious to do. That’s not a huge issue for a simple puzzle where you immediately intuit the solution, but when you need to try different things and iterate it can quickly get annoying. This is especially true because the game loves to change the rules in subtle ways and try to encourage non-linear thinking, which means that there are a lot of potential actions and solutions at any given time.

Portal was also technically sound, and while Superliminal is mostly pretty good from a technical perspective, I did encounter some issues. I only looked up one puzzle solution in the game, and that was because I managed to get myself stuck in positions where I had to reset from the checkpoint 4 different times while trying to solve it and I was so frustrated with the clipping issues and other problems in that area that I just wanted to get past it. I didn’t have any other issues that were quite so serious, but there are lots of fiddly little problems like situations where you think you’ve aligned things properly but the game doesn’t acknowledge the solution or the aforementioned problems where the game thinks the perspective is different from how it looks to you so you shrink an object when you’re trying to enlarge it or vice versa.

I’ve focused on these issues because otherwise the game does a pretty good job of accomplishing its goals. The writing is not as good as Portal’s and the puzzles aren’t as sharp and don’t make you feel as smart, but Portal was a high watermark for the genre so it’s hard to blame a game for not quite measuring up to that landmark achievement. Superliminal’s writing is often amusing and rarely annoying, and its puzzles hit more frequently than they miss. There were a few points where I got stuck for a bit or found a puzzle more annoying than interesting, but for the most part I was engaged during my playthrough and willing to put up with the issues just to see what interesting new mechanical iteration the game would offer up next. Aesthetically the game is pleasant, if not exceptional. The game enjoys messing with the player in ways that mostly worked for me, like the aforementioned objects that break apart when you try to grab them or a few invisible holes that appear to be solid floor until you try to walk across them. Alright game, you got me, fair enough.

The story also deviates enough from Portal by the end that it doesn’t just feel like a bad photocopy of a masterwork. Superliminal’s narrative is pretty predictable and at times a little hokey, but that’s okay. It has a couple small chuckles, some nice words of encouragement from the guy who plays the institute’s founder, and just enough story nuggets that you don’t feel like you’re just playing through an abstract series of puzzles, which I appreciated. It’s good that they don’t even attempt to compete with Portal’s legendary memes or incredible ending song. By doing its own thing as the game goes on the game makes it much easier to appreciate its own modest accomplishments rather than see them as a mere shadow of past greatness.

And that’s my overall view of Superliminal. It is a modest accomplishment. It’s not Portal and it has issues but it’s still a decent game and a pretty good time. I spent about 4 hours with the game, including trying some of the optional challenges and searching out collectables, and I did it over the course of about a week, spending a little bit of time with the game each morning after I woke up. It didn’t compel me to keep playing until I finished it in one long session, but neither did it turn me off so that I didn’t want to boot it up again the next day. It was a pleasant experience with some decent puzzles, some amusing visuals, some half-decent music, and a pleasant little narrative. I don’t think it’s something you have to rush out and experience but if you are in the mood for a relaxing puzzle adventure that evokes Portal you could do a whole lot worse, and other than the Portal games themselves I’m not sure you can really do better.

A friend of mine actually worked on this! I'm obviously biased, but I enjoyed the puzzles a lot.

Aesthetic and narrative wise, some part of me has just accepted "this is what indie puzzle games are now that Portal came out."

@lapsariangiraff: I liked the puzzles a fair amount. There were some that were a little tedious like the hallway puzzle where you have to race down the right direction or get sent back to the beginning and the puzzle where you have to put chess pieces on the floor to keep it solid but they were the exception rather than the rule.

For my tastes there were a few too many times when you enter a room and it's not at all clear what you're supposed to do and you have to figure out the rules, but that's a matter of personal taste and some people really like those 'blank slate' situations. I do think they interact very poorly with technical issues, because there were times when I couldn't tell if I was on the right track or I had just found a glitch, but there were few enough technical issues that it was MOSTLY not a glitch. Mostly.

So yeah, I agree that overall it has good puzzles.

I am going to have to strongly disagree with you on the "This is what indie puzzle games are now" thing though. I think there's a striking diversity of indie puzzle games out there. Even if you want to set aside 2D puzzle games like Baba is You or Wilmot's Warehouse, and 3D more traditional adventure games with puzzles like Call of the Sea, and the whole subgenre of puzzle platformers (and I think all of those games are indie puzzle games) there are still lots of 3D puzzle games with varied aesthetics. There's the escape room subgenre like I Expect You to Die and The Room. There's the Myst influenced subgenre led by Obduction but arguably including The Witness. There are just so many different types of puzzle games out there in so many configurations.

Yes there's a Portal influenced subgenre with quite a few high profile entries like The Turing Test and Quantum Conundrum, but it's a small slice of the indie puzzle pie. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with making a Portal-like as long as you do something interesting with it, and Superliminal does enough to differentiate itself (and I liked the game), but it's definitely one choice of direction among many options.

@bigsocrates: That's true. I suppose it speaks to the outsized influence Portal has had that it feels more prevalent than it actually is.

Reminds me of Tim Rogers' rant on how people are tired of "dad games." There are three main examples: The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite, and God of War. But that's pretty much it. And the fact that someone can say they "feel" overrun with dad games just points to, again, the outsized impression the Last of Us made on mainstream games. It feels bigger than it is.

@lapsariangiraff: Yeah Portal was a huge game. It also was true that for a few years there were a lot of games that copied its style, and fewer other types of puzzle games, but I think that's just no longer the case. VR in particular opened up a lot of design space for puzzle games, but even outside of that it's a genre that's going through a quiet renaissance. Partially because they're relatively cheap to develop, I'd imagine. And also the AAA competition is much lower.

The Last of Us? Bioshock Infinite? Never heard of them. I definitely feel overrun by dad games though!

@bigsocrates: Harumph! Silent Hill may be a "dad game," but the attached screenshot of Silent Hill 2 is a "widower game!" :P

Widower games are a-okay in my book as long as the protagonist didn't kill his wife.

Oh wait.

I am of course talking about the dark ending to Pac Land.

@lapsariangiraff: Any game can be a dad game if you want it badly enough.

It's a pretty good-looking game.