Superliminal Review (Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 & PC)

Superliminal is a lot more than mere fodder for your brain cells; it’s a wild, perplexing journey that meshes sleight of hand trickery with multi-layered, corridor-altering ideas. It is, if anything, one massive headache — but one that also comes with its own post-pulsating graphical remedies that happily soothe the pain. Finding said remedies, however, isn’t a small order; it’s a mind-bending process that requires every inch of your brain to overcome. What is reality, if not a giant sandbox of deception? Superliminal knows the answer. It just doesn’t want you to know it.

I’d be lying if I told you that I experienced less than twelve major a-ha moments during the Superliminal stint. In fact, most of the experience was one big a-ha moment. It might have taken somewhere between two and four business days for the words to leave my lips, but when the lightbulb illuminated, it felt great. Or at least, the lightbulb was far more comforting than the puzzles that consumed the vast and seemingly endless corridors of Superliminal’s perception-spiraling world.

From a creative standpoint, Superliminal stands out as a brilliant example of how something so simple can be made to feel extraordinary under the right basking light. It takes a moment for it to click—the true nature of the world and the reasoning behind its existence. But, when the jigsaw pieces begin to fall into place and you eventually find your rhythm, it becomes excruciatingly apparent. Superliminal isn’t a generic puzzle game; it’s an experimental craft that goes out on a whim to push your imagination to new heights.

It begins with a corridor, a switch, and a chess piece. At first, the piece seems small—to the point where you could quite comfortably fit it into the palm of your hand. A giant button sits before you, preventing you from accessing the next room. You take the chess piece, and you throw it across the white-washed room. It doubles in size, almost as if it’s swallowing the entire facility. You pick it up for a second time, and you place it on the switch. The door opens, and then you realize that you’re an experiment in a world-shattering dilemma. One room closes its door, but another opens. The journey takes hold, and the cogs in your head soon begin to whirl at speeds you never would have thought possible.

Superliminal isn’t a game that you can simply romp through and beat in a matter of minutes. Rather, it’s a game that forces you to think outside of the box. While the solution may seem simple in most rooms, almost everything that you come into contact with has another purpose. Like an optimal illusion, or a puzzle box with countless levers and mechanisms, each cog, block, and chess piece has a different side that you need to unravel. It doesn’t often make sense, but when it does begin to reveal its colors and the gears begin to align, it can cause an illuminating butterfly effect that can often leave you feeling oddly satisfied.

For the most part, Superliminal is all about testing the art of perception. Nothing is as it seems at face value, and everything holds a much deeper meaning. A chess piece; a building block; a checkered cube. In most cases, you would see ordinary items. But here, in Superliminal, the keys to your salvation are buried deep within the most ordinary of objects. It’s figuring out how to bend reality to your needs, that’s the tough part.

In the two hours that you spend with the clinical walls of Superliminal’s perplexing facilities, the game offers you dozens of puzzles to work through. In a Stanley Parable sort of way, you willingly sign your name on the dotted line of a seemingly harmless contract, and you follow a procedure that takes you deeper into its cortex. A narrator ushers you forward, and you, being at the mercy of deceptively clever puzzles, take a stab in the dark in an effort to make sense of them all.

While a lot of the campaign can feel like a clinically oppressive nightmare, Superliminal does an excellent job of keeping you on your toes with its surprisingly creative room layouts. Given that no two rooms are the same, and that each layer of the puzzle has its own collection of challenges and illogical solutions, the game does manage to obscure a lot of its greatest strengths behind various aspects of an ever-shifting diorama. And I’ll be honest, it executes all of these elements remarkably well, with genuinely interesting set pieces and small yet engaging details that are intentionally designed to make you feel as if you’re on the verge of a breakdown. But that’s all part of the Superliminal charm.

If you’re all for the idea of spending several hours wracking your brain over dozens of provoking puzzles and environmental curveballs, then chances are that you’ll enjoy sifting through the back corridors of this gargantuan duplex. Conceptually, it delivers a strong and admirable substitute for the casual puzzle game—a worthy adversary that has the depth and the inward complexity to hold a candle against even the most perplexing of first-person puzzlers. It might not be to everyone’s liking, though it is likely to appeal to those who crave a challenge that’s both unique and mentally rewarding.

Verdict

Superliminal deceptively presents itself as a genuine puzzle-fumbling corridor romper that can easily sway the casual observer into thinking that reality is flat, liminal, and self-explanatory. The truth, however, is that it harbors a stubborn interior that has the power to raise more questions than answers. And that is arguably its greatest achievement, believe it or not. It’s unapologetically condescending, yet also fantastically entertaining in the best possible way.

It almost feels like a no brainer, to recommend a game like Superliminal to a hardcore puzzle fanatic. Given that it dares to push the boundaries and experiment with realities that others have often failed to grasp, it just makes for an excellent work of art. It might put your mind through the wringer, but when all’s said and done, it does make an impression.