The game I experienced is Superliminal, a puzzle game developed by pillow castle, available on PC. I played for an hour on PC, progressed through two chapters, and watched a playthrough video for the subsequent content. This game features concise and elegant puzzle design and a dreamlike atmosphere (inspired by aesthetics like “liminal spaces”). It is suitable for fans of puzzle games, atmospheric games, and walking simulators, but it is not recommended for players who suffer from 3D motion sickness.
The core mechanic of Superliminal can be described in one sentence: “Perception is Reality.” This mechanic is easy to learn but hard to master, so we can describe the player experience through the skill-challenge curve. At first, the game is easy to pick up; players can solve simple puzzles intuitively and feel quite amazed. Subsequently, the puzzle difficulty increases, requiring a deeper understanding of the mechanics, and players begin to experience anxiety. However, after deeply understanding the mechanism, players can enter a state of flow. In the later stages, as the core mechanic is gradually fully understood, the game introduces other mechanics to avoid boredom.
The first puzzle of the game involves a castle blocking the path. When I clicked to interact, I found myself “grabbing” the castle. And when I walked into another room and “let go,” the castle surprisingly shrank. At the same time, I saw the text tutorial: “Perception is Reality.” This small puzzle drew me into the dreamlike atmosphere while giving me an initial understanding of the mechanic: when I hold an object and change my perspective, the size of the object changes.
Next, the puzzles become more complex: there are multiple objects in the room, and I need to make some smaller and some larger. The question is, how do I change their size by manipulating the perspective? I made a few attempts, such as holding an object and looking at the ceiling, then letting go. Repeated attempts made me somewhat frustrated, and I found it difficult to control its size accurately.
However, the game soon provided me with a eureka moment: I saw a pawn in a small window that seemed out of reach. Yet, I found that my mouse could interact with it. In other words, I could grab objects across vast distances. Are my arms too long? Not at all; I realized that this world lacks “depth.” That is to say, even though various objects appear to be at different layers in three-dimensional space, when I grab them, they are situated on the same two-dimensional plane. And when I let go, the world regains its depth. Therefore, based on the principle of “smaller when distant, larger when near,” I should focus not on the object itself, but on the reference objects next to it.
Guided by these puzzles, my understanding of the mechanic evolved from “experiential” to “conceptual,” and from “qualitative” to “quantitative,” while the “joy of learning” also began to emerge. After this mindset upgrade, the operations that previously felt annoying were no longer complicated; I could easily adjust the size of objects and felt like I was mastering this world.
In subsequent chapters, as players become gradually proficient in the “changing perspective” operation, the designers begin to introduce new mechanics, such as “cloning objects upon clicking.” However, I feel there is still some untapped potential in “perception is reality.” For instance, the idea that “when we are not looking, some things do not exist” could be used as a mechanic to “walk backward through walls.” Alternatively, there is a scene where the player needs to grab the moon down from the sky. Unlike other objects, the moon is unaffected by gravity. Nevertheless, the designers did not dig deeper into the direction of “zero gravity” or even “anti-gravity,” but I think combining the two dimensions of spatial directionality and distance would also spark interesting puzzles (for example, riding the moon upwards, which would be equivalent to “simultaneously shrinking all ground objects”).
The puzzle design in this game aligns with Bates’ definition of a “good puzzle”: these puzzles are concise and elegant, growing from a single core mechanic rather than being a patchwork of multiple mechanics. These puzzles are fair and do not require additional factual knowledge. They are crucial for shaping the dreamlike atmosphere, somewhat reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland; when the size of objects can be freely transformed and spatial depth is compressed into a flat plane (being able to pluck the moon just by reaching out), the sense of reality disintegrates accordingly. Finally, although there is no hint system in the game, the series of puzzles starting from the tutorial level is sufficient to let players gradually deepen their understanding of the mechanics. Even though players face some friction (the frustration of trial and error), a successful puzzle-solving experience is often accompanied by a “eureka moment” rather than the feeling of “I cheated.”
Considering ethical factors, I believe this game does not require players to have specific factual knowledge, but it implicitly demands a kind of procedural knowledge: the operation of 3D video games. If players have never played a 3D video game, they might find it difficult to understand the logic of “grabbing objects” and “switching perspectives,” and would likely struggle to complete puzzles that require precise perspective adjustments. From an accessibility standpoint, this also excludes players who suffer from 3D motion sickness. Furthermore, operational experience with 3D video games might actually form a part of the puzzle itself; it is only when players realize that the game’s operational feedback differs from their habits that they experience surprise and develop curiosity.
