15 August 2020 | New Scientist | 31Game
Superliminal
Pillow Castle
Multiple consoles
I HAVE been having strange dreams
recently. This may be due to the
ongoing coronavirus pandemic – a
survey in March found that people
in the UK have been getting more
sleep due to lockdown measures,
and more sleep can have an effect
on your dreams.
Or it might be that I have been
playing Superliminal, a first-person
game designed to mess with your
head and your perception of space.
It takes place entirely in dreams,
with the unnamed character
you play as participating in an
experimental form of therapy
called Somnasculpt administered
by a Dr Glenn Pierce.
The story here is pretty light.
As you pass through the game, you
hear messages from Pierce and the
AI that is running the dream therapy,
with both getting increasingly
agitated as you become lost in the
dreamscape, but that is about it.
The plot is essentially a set-up for
very clever forced perspective and
other optical illusions.
This is demonstrated early in
the game, when you pick up a chess
piece from a table. Place it down
again and it has changed in size
to match your perspective. If that
sounds confusing, think about
the classic tourist photo of people
pretending to support the leaning
tower of Pisa, and imagine you
could actually shrink it down to
hold it up for real. You can repeat
the trick over and over, making
objects tiny or gigantic.
You use this ability to pass
through a series of surreal puzzle
rooms, placing objects on pressure
plates or making a wedge of cheese
large enough to use as a ramp
to a high door. Later levels add
complications, such as needing to
stand in a specific spot to transform
an image stretched across a wall
into an object you can pick up.
Developer Pillow Castle loves
to mess with you, changing the
“rules” of the game just as youhave figured out how something
works. But, ultimately, the forced
perspective wears thin. Many of
the game’s puzzles can be solved
by picking up an object, holding it in
the air and watching a larger version
fall to the ground with a thud. This
is fun the first few times – I actually
ran out of the way, worrying that I
was about to be squished by a giant
chess piece – but it doesn’t offer
enough variety.The game is obviously inspired
by Portal, a 2007 release that
kicked off the first-person puzzle
genre, in which you also navigate
a series of rooms while listening to
an AI, in that case, the malevolent
GLaDOS, which berates you at
every turn. Rather than forced
perspective, you use a “portal gun”
to solve puzzles. This allows you
to connect two surfaces via a
wormhole through which you
and objects can pass.
In later levels, Superliminal
introduces its own version of portals
in the form of linked doorways that
can be resized, making you grow or
shrink as you pass through them.
It is a fun idea, but in practice I found
it very fiddly. My struggles to line up
the doors in the way I wanted left
me pining for Portal’s elegance.
It is perhaps unfair to compare
Superliminal to one of the greatest
games of all time, but it doesn’t
help itself by aping Portal so closely.
The game does at least have a
more optimistic tone than Portal’s
cynicism, ending with a positive
message that some people may find
to be a genuinely useful takeaway
from the experience. ❚Superliminal has a
creative relationship
with perspective PIL
LOW^ CAS
TL
E^ GAMESMind-altering perspectives
Superliminal messes with your head and perception of space,
but the trick wears thin too quickly, says Jacob Aron
“ I actually ran out of
the way, worrying
that I was about to
be squished by a
giant chess piece”Don’t miss
Watch
John Was Trying to
Contact Aliens tells the
story of John Shepherd,
who spent 30 years
trying to contact
extraterrestrials by
broadcasting music
millions of kilometres
into space. On Netflix
from 20 August.Read
Grasp: The science
transforming the way
we learn sees Sanjay
Sarma, head of open
learning at MIT, join
fellow researcher
Luke Yoquinto to explain
how scientific findings in
wildly different fields are
transforming the way
we learn and teach.Visit
Driverless: who
is in control? is an
excellent exhibition
about autonomous
vehicles at London’s
Science Museum.
The museum reopens
on 19 August, and is
extending this show
until January 2021.
NETF
LIX;^ R
OBORAC
E