Superliminal

Superliminal is a puzzle video game played from the first-person perspective. The player-character is a participant in a dream therapy program, but during the study, the character becomes trapped in a recurring dream cycle, meaning that they will wake up from dreams in dreams, and is guided by the voice of the study's overseer, Dr. Glenn Pierce, on how to escape from the dream.

Most puzzles involve traversing through a series of rooms to reach their exits. The exit door may be closed and require a button to be held down to open, or atop a higher platform out of reach, or may not be immediately visible. To reach the exit, the player can manipulate certain objects in the game world. The bulk of such interactions are based on the use of forced perspective: the player can pick up a waist-high cube, which is then kept at its apparent current size from the player's perspective.

The player heads to the Pierce Institute to get some therapy from its new SomnaSculpt technology which is designed to provide dream therapy to patients. They are put to sleep and placed in a testing environment constructed in their dreamworld, where they are capable of performing reality bending feats such as changing the size of items based on perspective or instantly creating copies of them. However, the player fails to wake up at their appointed time, ending up back inside the dreamworld. A Pierce Institute doctor, Dr.

Glenn Pierce, communicates to the player through radios, explaining that they have completely lost track of the player, and that the player is likely traveling through successive dream layers. Meanwhile, the AI administering the dream therapy advises the player to initiate an "Explosive Mental Overload" in order to trigger the "Emergency Exit Protocol" and escape the dreamworld.

Superliminal was developed by the six-member team of Pillow Castle, led by Albert Shih, a student from the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University. Shih had developed the foundation of the game while an undergraduate student at ETC around 2013 as part of a programming assignment, looking for "what kind of interesting first person game can I build by just moving cubes around?" He improved upon the concept during his graduate work, establishing Pillow Castle in January 2014 and obtaining assistance from four other ETC students to build out the game. Shih had been inspired by successful games like Risk of Rain and Antichamber that had been made by small teams to continue his work on Superliminal.

Antichamber was particularly influential to Shih, as it directed and encouraged the player to think outside the box to discover the solutions to its puzzles, an idea he wanted to recapture in Superliminal. In a similar fashion, Shih likened Superliminal's scaling puzzles to the portal-based ones in Portal, designing the puzzles to create moments of epiphany for the player.

Superliminal received "generally favorable reviews" according to review aggregator Metacritic. The game's core mechanic was praised, while criticism was leveled at the game's story and brief length.

The game was nominated for "Game, Puzzle" at the NAVGTR Awards.