By Devin Gloeckner & Phillip Nelson Released in 2019, Superliminal, developed by Pillow Castle games, is a game that literally follows the phrase, “perception is reality.” To progress in the game, players have to solve puzzles using optical illusions, perspective, and apparent scale. One of the main tools for solving puzzles is picking up objects and looking at them from different angles to change their apparent size, which then literally changes their size. As you progress in the game, the story follows your character’s dream state. The opening premise is that a company is using “SomnaSculpt” technology for conducting dream therapy for patients who are having feelings of self-doubt or low self-worth. Their goal is to help people that feel small and unimportant discover their worth by playing with size and perspective in their dreams. This, however, [SPOILER ALERT] goes wrong for the player’s character, as the monitors of the dream therapy lose track of them and the player [DOUBLE SPOILER ALERT] seemingly descends dangerously far into a dream state. The game looks a little silly at first, but is quickly derailed into a metacommentary on the state of puzzle games. It has an introspective story about perception and self-worth without losing the cynical edge that has grown to be expected in recent years. Throughout, it develops a message about perception and choice and/or a lack thereof. In a similar vein to Portal, the game explores interesting game physics while convincing you that you’re defying the authority of the game. The storytelling is largely environmental, with information being fed to you by an omniscient narrator(or several). The main mechanic, apparent scale, turns the game from a “walking simulator” into more of a “looking simulator”, the puzzles falling into a few patterns. The metacommentary picks up fairly early on as the narrator makes you run through a literal tutorial with the in-universe excuse of “calibration”, similar to Portal’s “tests”. Shortly thereafter you are trapped in a room, the only escape being through a wall that is leaned over. There we receive our first “warning”. From the beginning of the story, our perception decides the reality wholly, and yet we are easily funneled into a separate section of the story. This is doubled down on later with the use of an alarm clock to “wake us up” and reset the player's position to a familiar bedroom. You are not given an option to wait for the calibration to be fixed, nor an escape from the alarm clock, the only choice that exists is to “defy authority”. But is that really even the choice? Superliminal could not work in any other narrative format. The game gives an expectation of choice and then denies you in a way that only remains interesting because of the game mechanics used to explore it. If you were to read a choose your own adventure novel from front to back, only for there to be no choices, every page you read “you’re getting further from the intended story but hey there’s a large chess piece”, and then you’re only told it was actually just a commentary on the last page, the experience would be disappointing. If I dare mention it, it’s almost a paradoxically streamlined version of The Stanley Parable. Instead of being presented two options and defying authority of your own free will only to be followed by the authority and realize you never left it, the game denies you free will while obsessing that you’ve broken free of authority only to deliver the punchline at the end. [SPOILER ALERT] Close to the end of the game, there is a monologue delivered that leaves little room for interpretation. It begins with the line, “Hello, my name is Doctor Glenn Pierce and by now you may have noticed that everything has happened exactly as it was supposed to.” It alludes to how everything we see is molded to the perception we have in our minds, and how these small changes in perception from person to person govern our reality. How the feeling of loss of control is bitterly necessary to releasing ourselves from our preconceived notions, and how getting older cements these notions. The last moments of the game deliver extremely conflicting messages. One is a message of hope through the narrow lane that each of us is locked into by the authorities in life, urging us to persevere and see things from new perspectives. The other is the bleakness of realizing that you were never in control, and the existential dread associated with knowing we are locked into these lanes. While it’s not quite a traditional narrative, the game could be more easily compared to allegorical literature than any contemporary fiction.
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AuthorWe are the students of "Digital Literatures" at Millikin University. These are some of the digital narratives that entice, inspire, and challenge us. Categories
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