I enjoyed the haunting atmosphere of mundane surroundings made eerie by surreal visions of stopped clocks, oversized chess boards, and fractured Rubik's cubes. Superliminal's short demo sticks to the basics: introducing the size-changing puzzles and the setting. The current demo is less adventurous in puzzle design than the tech demo from 2014, which I suspect means that all the best puzzles are being saved for release.
#IS SUPERLIMINAL A HORROR GAME FULL#
I just wonder what Superliminal is like in full swing. With the positive reception of Control this year, it seems we aren't worn out yet on the surreal being treated as mundane by shady companies and bureaucratic entities. Superliminal carries a classic Portal-like vibe of outsmarting a system designed to trap you with a similar dry humor, a comparison that could easily be either vindicating or damning seeing how many games have gone the weird facility and wry narration route. "If you do happen to see your parents, please punch them in the face as hard as you can and immediately run away," he says quite calmly. In one, he cautions me not to interact with anything that seems "psychologically significant." In case that isn't clear enough, he provides a colorful example. I'm now routinely climbing out of rooms with colored walls and smooth jazz into dark and forbidding back halls filled with the whoosh of air through industrial ducts and the occasional tape from Dr. Other Rubik's cubes are the caps to long pillars that I can push and pull out of the floor and walls.ĭoes my character have some preoccupation with Rubik's cubes haunting them in their sleep? Are the little rainbow puzzles a standard part of iLids protocol? The recurring elements are amusing when you attempt to take them at face value, but like any good puzzle game, Superliminal is teaching me its language and its rules by making each new challenge familiar but slightly different from the last. Another Rubik's cube falls apart when I touch it, turning into a pile of multicolored blocks. I pick up a Rubik's cube and find it's cut in half. The puzzles quickly become more abstract than before. "Please assist us by finding your way out of this dream without assistance." Meaning me, apparently lost in my own dreams. Glen Pierce informs me that "we" have no idea where "you" are. An early '00s boom box sits on one of the ducts, flashing red.
I'm in the service hallways of the buildings now, surrounded by brick, concrete, and thick round ventilation ducts. In the next room, a block hides an open doorway boarded over with planks that I pull off and discard. In one hallway a window shows a room stuffed full of alarm clocks so tightly they're pressed against the glass all reading "12:05 AM." The jazz feels ominous now. It's a pleasant backtrack, until things start to get strange, that is. Unassuming piano jazz plays over the speakers while I pick up and put down all the toys provided for me in each room. Glen PierceĪ prerecorded woman's voice tells me over the intercom that this set of rooms is my introductory tutorial to the Interactive Lucid Dream State (yes, that's iLids). If you do happen to see your parents, please punch them in the face as hard as you can and immediately run away. If this is the tutorial, I can't imagine how complex it'll get later on. I do the same with the second block, stack them like a set of stairs, and climb out.
When I drop it, it's almost as tall as I am. I pick up a block and hold it near my face so it appears half the size of the opposite wall. In another room there's nothing but a set of small wooden alphabet blocks and an exit about ten feet off the ground on the opposite wall. A giant chess piece blocks an entire hallway, so I pick it up while standing far away and put it down closer to myself, cutting its size in half. The first few rooms, all with the same austere color scheme, introduce me to the rules of the dreamland with some forced perspective puzzles, covering these basic principles.
0 kommentar(er)
