Background
I decided to play Superliminal, a game developed by Pillow Castle Games, in which the player is immersed into a dream therapy experiment. However, as the player continues to bypass the dream’s boundaries, they end up in an endless dream loop that they must escape by solving puzzles dealing with perspective. The game’s calm, liminal style makes it suitable for all ages, but the difficulty of some puzzles may cause younger audiences to struggle.
Thesis
In this post, I will examine how Superliminal uses object manipulation and perspective-based mechanics to create puzzles that are generally fun and fair, though not all puzzles maintain a balance between conceptual challenge and mechanical execution—an imbalance that can occasionally detract from the game’s thematic strengths.
Analysis
In one puzzle, the player finds themself stuck in a dark room whose exit is blocked off by wooden planks. After exploring the room, the player realizes that nothing is able to be picked up and moved other than the exit sign beyond the wooden planks. At this point, which is about an hour and half into the game, the player understands that objects can be picked up and moved, so players will pick up the exit sign and realize that it is a source of light. My initial instinct was to scale up the size of the exit sign to illuminate the entire room but realized that this was not helpful. After leaving the room with the exit sign, I realized that its light revealed an alternate exit and moved onto the next level.
Bob Bates, in his essay, “Designing the Puzzle,” argues that a good puzzle must be fair. He defines a fair puzzle as one in which all knowledge needed to solve it is contained within the game and can always be solved with enough thinking. I believe that the exit sign puzzle coincides with Bates’s definition of fairness, since it required no outside knowledge and because the exit sign was easily discoverable. Additionally, the puzzle was very solvable without any overly difficult twists. At this point in the story, the player has been molded into a powerful telekinetic manipulator of nearby objects. According to Bates, a good puzzle must also amplify a theme in order to prevent contradicting the narrative. By designing the puzzle to involve seamlessly manipulating an exit sign through space, the game’s overall theme of manipulating perspective was reinforced.
In a later puzzle, the player finds themself stuck in a room with two doors and a small keyhole high up the wall. Quickly, the player discovers that both doors are interactable, meaning that they can be moved throughout the room and scaled up and down. Additionally, the doors are linked so that by walking through one, you exit out of the other. The height of the player also changes according to the size of the door you exit. My strategy for solving this, which I believe to be the intended strategy, was to scale up one door so that the top of it would be right below the keyhole, and scale down the other door, placing it on top of the first one. This allowed me to walk through the first door and exit through the second door at a height from which I could jump through the keyhole.
Based on Bob Bates’s definition of fairness, this puzzle was fair since the puzzle was contained to the room. It also enhanced the game’s overall theme of manipulating space and perspective. However, I argue that this puzzle was not effective because devising a solution to the puzzle was not the focus of the challenge. Rather, moving one door on top of the other proved to be an incredibly tedious task. I spent most of my time trying to angle my camera pixel-perfectly so that I could position the second door precisely where I needed it. There were also a couple times when I accurately scaled the sizes of the doors, but failed to jump through the keyhole and had to reset my progress. I believe that it is important for problem-solving puzzles to prioritize cognition over precision, which Superliminal failed to do with this puzzle.
Conclusion
Superliminal succeeds in crafting a surreal, thought-provoking experience where players are encouraged to challenge their perceptions. Many of its puzzles are designed with fairness and clarity in mind, aligning with Bob Bates’s principles and reinforcing the game’s themes of altered perspective. However, as seen in the more mechanically tedious segments, like the dual door puzzle, the game sometimes shifts its focus away from cognitive exploration and toward technical precision, which can break immersion and frustrate players. Despite these occasional missteps, Superliminal remains a great example of how gameplay mechanics can inform how a player experiences puzzles.
Ethics
An important ethical consideration in Superliminal is the type of knowledge the game assumes its players possess. While all of its puzzles are fairly contained within the boundaries of the game, they still require a kind of abstract thinking that not all players may have. For example, the idea that objects can be scaled based on perspective may be difficult to understand without prior understanding of 3D space. Superliminal does succeed, though, in managing level difficulty effectively. Even without prior knowledge of 3D space, the player develops an intuition for the game mechanics and abstract thinking in earlier tutorial levels, and refines this intuition as difficulty progresses. The game also requires patience and experimentation, which players with cognitive disabilities may struggle with. I believe that Superliminal fails to address this effectively, especially considering the tediousness of some of the more technically precise levels.
