I have woken from dreams before with marks I cannot explain, but remember getting them in said dream. However, Nightmare on Elm St happens within your dreams and anything can happen there. This is due to pretty much every other single horror film can be explained away logically. To put it in context, the only horror film I am genuinely terrified by is Nightmare on Elm St. But Superliminal manages to mess with my head in a whole new way.Īs someone who loves logic and can only function when things are always logical, this was difficult to cope with. The horrors of Silent Hill, Resident Evil VII, the mind fuck that is Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice or the emotional pull from games such as The Last Of Us, Persona 4, That Dragon Cancer and various others. I’ve played games that have messed with me before. It is an odd game in this respect and whilst you feel clever when you find your way through various areas, it also becomes apparent you can sort of brute force your way past some sections, whereas others require plenty of lateral thinking and planning. At times it makes no literal sense, but whilst still having guided you in a way you can easily make sense of what is happening. Yet it then pulls you back into that box and gets you to apply real world logic. It forces you to always be thinking outside the box, always looking at what is usable to progress. Superliminal does a wonderful thing within its well crafted world. I might not be explaining that in the best, way, but if you’ve played either of those games, you get the idea. Using a simple / mundane world around you, feels you initially with comfort, but soon becomes increasingly uncomfortable. Superliminal actually takes that part further than both of those aforementioned games. I don’t just mean with regards to the the game mechanics either. To comparison to Portal and The Stanley Parable comes from a sense that all is not as it seems. I mention that there is a mix of supposed real world restriction, with the idea that anything is possible in a dream state and after initially thinking this was a limitation of the game and something to criticise, I soon felt like this was a deliberate decision from the developers, designed to force you to think and act in a certain way. But it is the evolving game mechanics that keep you super invested from start to finish. There are plenty of surprises, twists and turns to the unfolding story and the game mechanics themselves. Set within a lucid dream, you sense anything is possible, but yet somehow still restricted within known real world rules. The is the general concept of Superliminal to use the world around you and manipulate seemingly mundane objects to go through a series of rooms and progress through the world. So when that perceived reality is messed with, our brains do some weird mental gymnastics to process what we actually look at. The way our brains function and interpret the world around is truly a thing of wonder. Or whether you know who M.C Escher is, we are generally all blown away by optical illusions. Who doesn’t like a good optical illusion? It doesn’t matter if you see the sailboat or not. For now though I’ll concentrate on what is placed in front of you, in a game where you literally cannot believe your own two eyes. Look, I’ll come to my reasoning for those first statements in a bit. We aren’t talking anywhere near rip-off territory here, as Castle Pillow Games’ title is still unique in its own way. Well that and I felt a bit of The Stanley Parable in there too. I’m not saying that Superliminal has a few nods to Portal, but Superliminal has a few nods to Portal.
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