Note: This article includes major spoilers for Superliminal and Wolfenstein: The New Order, and minor spoilers for Portal and Antichamber.

Even fourteen years on from its release, everyone discussing puzzle games is still talking about Portal. We don't seem to be able to get away from Valve's mind-bending cognitive exam; every new PC and console game in the genre is inevitably and extensively compared to it. You can see why: It's an accessible point of reference because both writer and audience are likely to be intimately familiar with Portal. However, if we want to learn about games as a medium and not just a few examples of the form, we can't keep coming back to the same reference material.

There's a current trend of film articles to explore cinematic tropes and techniques predominantly or purely throughthelensofMarvelmovies. It's positive that there are on-ramps to understanding films that hold up popular entertainment for reference. Still, by discussing the whole craft of cinema in relation to a single franchise, these writers present only a tiny square of the medium's great tapestry. If we only deconstruct Marvel films, we get the impression that they are the be-all and end-all of the medium. A generation of filmmakers and audiences ends up with a much smaller film vocabulary and misses out on a lot of cool art. So, I don't want to do the same thing with video games: to reduce this storied and vibrant galaxy of experiences to one or two stars.

The thing is, the elephant in the room doesn't get any smaller for us ignoring it. Because many modern puzzles games incorporate large chunks of Portal, you need to talk about Valve's work to review them in full. Specifically, many PC/console puzzle games must answer the question "What comes after Portal?". You had this cult hit that revolutionised puzzle design, audiovisual representation of puzzle elements, and narrative delivery. Now, if developers create environmental puzzle games as they did before Portal, their material often looks dated by comparison. But if they blithely import all of Portal's lessons, they risk making an also-ran. That is unless they can figure out how to evolve the Portal genotype and not simply replicate it.

Some recent cube-and-switch adventures have edged out from Portal's orbit more successfully than others, but we've never had a repeat of that moment in 2006 when Valve first showed their experimental brainteaser. We've not quite ever returned to that flashpoint where it felt we were looking at the future of the genre. The closest we've gotten was the debut of Superliminal. Pillow Castle's 2019 puzzler allows us to pluck objects from our surroundings and wave them around in front of our faces. Of course, how big these items look compared to the room is a matter of perspective. The twist is that when you place an object back down, it will stay as large as it appeared in your view when you dropped it. If you lift a chess piece off of a table and hold it up in front of you, so it looks like it fills the whole room, when you let go of it, it will fill the entire room. This trailer features the mechanic in action:

Superliminal's base mechanic is like Portal's in that you can immediately understand it from a short demonstration, yet it completely changes how you think about objects relating to space. In Portal, the distance between entities in play often becomes irrelevant. Any two locations you can link with a portal effectively have a distance of 0 between them, even if they are on the other side of a chamber from each other. In Superliminal, size often becomes irrelevant because anything you can pick up can effectively take on any volume. With this new conception of objects and spaces comes the potential for a new dimension of puzzle design.

But it's not just Portal's core mechanic that Superliminal can compete with. Like its father, Pillow Castle's game understands the importance of an interesting premise: one form of engaging framing. Framing is so important for how we receive media. I've seen people ask why a pile of bricks on the street is a pile of bricks, but a pile of bricks in a museum is art, and that's the answer: "framing". The stack of bricks in the museum asks you to consider it as an aesthetic object, something with an appealing shape and colour, and maybe even meaning, rather than a set of utilitarian items. You might think it's striking, you might think it's stupid, but the framing is a factor in how, and therefore, what you think about the work. For other examples of the influence of framing, you might look at a drawing differently if you knew your daughter scribbled it rather than a stranger's kid. Or you would receive a scene in a documentary differently from one in a fiction film.

Going way back, many environmental puzzle games had trouble with framing; plenty still do. Their design often vocalised that players were not exploring an organic world, but a space contrived for play, even when their storytelling claimed otherwise. Therefore, the player was less likely to suspend their disbelief. Portal's stroke of genius was to fold that synthetic character of the environment into the fiction. Its setting read as being designed by an intelligence, but that was appropriate when Aperture Science canonically constructed it. It felt like we were undergoing engineered tests of our skill, but the game said that's because the AI GLaDOS was experimenting on us. And here we find one of those perfect examples of how developers are often locked into either plaster casting Portal or having their games look primitive by comparison. Set your title in a test facility, as Portal does, and it appears like plagiarism, but choose an alternative setting, and you might not end up with a believable environment.

Impressively, Superliminal finds a framing that acknowledges that its levels are the product of conscious design but is nonetheless original. In this experience, we play a patient undergoing an unconventional new therapy. In this therapy, we enter dreams architected by psychologists. According to its inventor, Dr. Glenn Pierce, the "SomnaSculpt" framework is there to help anyone who finds themselves minimising life crises or blowing minor failures out of proportion.

A common sentiment among reviewers of Superliminal is that it doesn'tdevelopenough on its root ideas, as so, lacks the richness of other acclaimed puzzle entertainment. While I am very fond of this game, I agree. But keeping with that theme of framing, I want to talk specifically about how Superliminal isn't the therapeutic experience it presents itself as. Initially, its psychiatric premise appears to be nothing more than touchpaper to ignite an existentially troubling drama, but it actually runs to the heart of Superliminal's identity. After an introductory run of puzzles, we walk into a test chamber with a bricked up exit. The only way out is to embiggen an object enough to knock down the walls and slip into a behind-the-scenes area where we conduct the rest of the game.

The SomnaSculpt protocol and Dr. Pierce lose track of our location within this subconscious dreamscape. When we get back on their radar, they tell us that we're not cured but that they're out of therapy to dispense. We spend some time trapped in a time loop, repeatedly waking from a dream into the same dream. Then, we take a pit stop in the SomnaSculpt diagnostic software before finally reaching a highly abstract white space where Dr. Pierce tells us that our ramble through the back alleys of our brain was all part of the therapy. The psychiatrist imparts his philosophy that all humans start out as blank canvases who can see the world how they want, but that over time, our experiences make it harder to adopt our ideal perspectives. He says that we become so scared of failure that we don't try new solutions to problems, and so, we end up failing anyway.

As an antidote to this fear, Pierce developed a subconscious space in which we could witness the power of perspective to change our circumstances. He hoped that visitors would carry the mindset from this sandbox back into the real world. He observes that we faced hopelessness and difficulty during the course of the game but overcame it by adopting new perspectives. The doctor says that our life will always be hard, but we can always use a novel viewpoint on a problem to change things. All we have to do is to "wake up".

Considering that Dr. Pierce is absent for the large majority of the game, it is shocking how much there is to unpack in these closing statements. Let's take them a step at a time. Glenn's claim that people start as "nothing" is vague, and I could make educated guesses about what he means by this, but I don't think that would be fair to the game or helpful to you. There's more meat to chew on in Pierce's statement that we start off seeing the world however we desire because that's a clear claim that we can attack.

Humans begin as babies, and babies don't have much context for what's happening around them or the imagination to conceive of something different. Of course, babies then grow into children, and for them, Pierce has a point. Just look at the stories tykes tell about their toys or the explanations toddlers will come up with for how the world works. Children often hold idealised and fantastical views of reality. However, it's not as if kids can bend subjective reality to their whim. If an eight-year-old doesn't get the ice cream they wanted, they don't believe they have the ice cream because that's what they'd prefer; they usually just sulk all the way home.

Pulling what we can from Pierce's wreckage, I think we'd at least agree that our experiences can leave us with undesirable perceptions. Additionally, you'd probably side with me in saying that as people get older, they tend to become bogged down in seeing things one way, and that way isn't always healthy. The game doesn't provide any description of how experiences change perceptions or what those changes constitute. Resultantly, it lacks some depth in its argument, but the point is made. Pierce is right that people can become so afraid of failure that they don't change their mindsets or behaviours.

Psychologists tell us that fear induces closed-mindedness. So, when we're severely anxious that failing at a task would incur a terrible loss, we're less likely to break from our current patterns. In shutting ourselves off from creative approaches to life issues, we can feel that we're playing life safe. Yet, by discounting solutions and viewpoints outside our current box, we close a lot of potential doors that may open onto better lives.

Of course, if you're feeling overwhelmed by life or can't prioritise concerns appropriately, that's not necessarily because of fear of failure. You could lack support networks, be under immense pressure, never have been taught life skills, or suffer from low self-esteem. These issues can all relate to fear of failure, but they're not the same thing. Ironically, Superliminal undermines its point with examples of how a lack of success can come from some source other than fear. Its puzzles have no explicit fail states and levy no penalties for poor performance. Assuming you're moderately confident playing video games, when you get stuck in Superliminal, it won't be out of terror. It's more likely that you'll be calm but not have quite the right creative or logical spark in the moment.

Fear of failure can also manifest in emotions and behaviours other than uncreative problem-solving. There's shame, poor motivation, and self-sabotage, to name a few. A common response to anxiety is avoidingtheproblem altogether, and sufferers may even nurture a substanceaddiction through attempting to escape their fear with drugs. It's natural that someone might run from a problem that activates their fight-or-flight response.

That said, we can all benefitfrom seeing things from a different perspective. Everyone has times in which they're mentally burdened or underprioritise pressing matters. And I love that Superliminal is trying to use puzzles to lift us over that hump. Scale is often a viscerally powerful characteristic of game objects and settings, and Superliminal's puzzles are mostly about what you can size up or down. You exist inside your mind, and within that setting, you are able to arrange items to be as huge or as tiny as you need to reach your goals. The design doesn't just tell you but imparts through the power of scale that things are only as big or small as you make them in your head. And in its forced perspective puzzles, it's literally looking at your problems from the right angle that lets you solve them.

In one of my favourite rooms, we can copy objects, creating a clone of them that appears a short distance in front of us. Our goal is to use that ability to depress a button. The level contains an immovable giant apple with the button far from it, at the top of a set of stairs. Between the apple and stairs is a high power fan. You can spend all day trying to clone tiny apples out of the large one, and roll them up the stairs, only for the fan to blow them away every time. The solution to the puzzle is to climb the stairs and look past the button towards the giant apple. This time, when you clone the fruit, its copy will drop onto the button in front of you and open the door. What better metaphor for abandoning a futile struggle in your life to find a solution from an unlikely standpoint?

The game is also full of passive perspective tricks like loading bars that break beyond their boundaries or a corridor that looks real from a distance until you discover its end is painted onto a wall. In real life, finding out something isn't what we thought it was can feel jarring and upsetting. In the SomnaSculpt framework, having your expectations broken is often a pleasant surprise.

Superliminal isn't saying that perception is reality exactly. We've already discussed how first impressions of the environment or puzzles can be misleading. A card found early in the dreamscape declares "perception is reality", but further in, we hit a sign that tells us the opposite is true. There's even a room where "perception is reality" notes are endlessly stacked atop each other, indicating it's a cheap, cookie-cutter bromide. Superliminal's play acknowledges that some aspects of the world are fixed beyond our control and that many tempting solutions to our problems are impractical. However, the game also opines that the right perspective changes can take us from feeling like our constraints doom us to failure to believing we can achieve the impossible.

Throughout these environments, Pillow Castle plays with the concept of liminality. Anthropologists have long been interested in rites of passage: rituals that mark a person's move from one social group into another. Think a wedding, a bar mitzvah, or an initiation ceremony. The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep introduced the idea that rites of passage have three stages. The first is separation, breaking off from the old social position. The last is reaggregation, being integrated into the new position. But in between the two, we are left dangling in the chasm of liminality.

Liminality is the disorienting and uneasy in-between stage of moving from one role to another. We can feel loss at having left our old place, and what it stood for, behind, and confusion and discomfort at entering a new social role. Superliminal is a decidedly individual experience, and so can't talk much about alterations in our social identity and responsibilities. However, it operates with, at least, a pseudo-liminality, transporting the player into unfamiliar situations that are potentially disorienting and challenging. What's more, these experiences can potentially be the bridge from where the player starts to a new outlook on life. The structure and some emotions of a rite of passage may be present in Superliminal, even if there is no rite of passage itself.

Architecture also has its own concept of the "liminal". Liminal spaces are the areas between a point of origin and a destination. They're not where people generally stay; they're locations made for passing through, e.g. hallways, elevators, and car parks. Superliminal's setting is almost entirely a mosaic of hallways, elevators, car parks, etc. It again leaves us in that airlock stage: We exist in a state where we are hungry to get to an implied destination because there is no comfortable rest stop where we are.

In the story, liminality is present in our perspective changes: both our perspective on life issues and on the plot. We appear to be tackling a straightforward set of therapeutic tasks until knocking down a wall leaves us external to the clinical environment. There is a separation, and we are left in a liminal limbo. Near the end of the game, our viewpoint changes once more as we understand that we never left the therapy: the breakout was all part of it, and we are reaggregated.

Note that when we perceived that we were stranded in our subconscious, we appeared lost and doomed. However, with a shift of our viewpoint, yet no shift in the actual threat to us, we came to understand ourselves as safe and flourishing. The game uses the benefit of changing our perspective on its plot as a proof of the virtue of shifting perspectives in general. It's all about taking the same experiences and seeing what happens when you view them with a negative inflexion and then a positive one.

Yet, we're talking a lot about framing here, and we can't consider framing in isolation. Superliminal's contextualisation of its events is all very clever, but it doesn't matter how smart your framing is if it doesn't match what it's presenting. When I hit that speech at the end of the experience about the trials I'd passed and my radical change in mindset, it didn't feel like Pierce was talking about the game I'd just played. The problem is there's a sophisticated container and a good start for a liminal odyssey here, but nothing that psychologically inspiring within the container.

The SomnaSculpt treatment relies on us overcoming sizeable struggles to show us our own capabilities and prove the efficacy of certain mental techniques. But it rarely succeeds at those goals because its trials aren't that strenuous. At least, for me. Some players may find the challenges formidable, but if you're the kind of person who plays environmental puzzle games semi-regularly, it'll mainly be smooth sailing.

Difficult puzzle titles often keep the same mechanics in play for long periods at a time. This extended exposure allows the game to explore many complex ways in which it can weave its mechanics together and provides plenty of time to lull us into assumptions about how the rules work. Puzzle games often exploit that complexity and those assumptions to make levels seem impossible when really we just need a new perspective on what we've already seen. Thematically, that's what Superliminal should be doing.

Superliminal, however, gets bored easily. It will lower a new mechanic into our cage, dangle it around for a few puzzles, and then wander off to another mechanic relatively spontaneously. As a result, we never end up too far from the tutorial grade in using any one rule or item, and so, the game offers few brainteasers that will push your cognitive limits. It cruises along at a roughly medium difficulty, and that's not a problem from a uncontextualised aesthetic standpoint but is from the perspective of its thesis statement.

If the game wants us to exit with the belief that we can smash barriers using novel perspectives, no matter how daunting those barriers are, it needs the barriers to actually be daunting. If I, the player, took the game to heart, I wouldn't feel that I could solve fiendish life problems with a change of perspective. I'd believe that I could surpass many of the mid-sized ones, but not be sure about any challenge greater than that. Perhaps this is an inescapable byproduct of different people having different skill levels at the same tasks.

It's further counterproductive that sometimes in Superliminal, it's not thinking outside the box, but well inside it, that unlocks the next room. There was one puzzle in which I was unsure how to leave the level but noticed an exit sign that I could pick up. I had the idea to place the object over a closed door, transforming it into a way out, but the game didn't honour that solution. Instead, I was meant to act much less creatively, turning the signage into a big ramp, following the pattern that had dominated much of the play up to then.

Another puzzle featured an inflatable castle, a diving board, and my goal on an even higher diving board. "Great!", I thought when I encountered it. "A bouncy castle and an invitation to jump onto it". I figured that if the inflatable was the right size and I was falling fast enough towards it, I could trampoline off of it to the exit. This would have been a novel solution. Unfortunately, the answer was, again, something much more predictable, involving moving one door in front of the exit in much the same way I had previously.

The sense that we are up against impossible odds is also not remotely established by the narrative and seldom by the setting. After that moment when the game forces us to deviate from the prescribed path, few of the environments are that menacing. At any one time, you're probably in a pink hallway or a warehouse corridor. Pierce and the SomnaSculpt protocol often tell us we're in peril, but it's not like there's anything that can hurt us in the dream world or even a point of comparison for what the therapy "should" look like. When disaster strikes, it all seems to be happening somewhere in the waking world, gently implied by a soft-spoken doctor but too distant and inconsequential for us to panic over it.

Compare Superliminal to a game like Wolfenstein: The New Order, which more actively and explicitly presents danger. There is no ambiguity over whether its alternative 20th century looks inviting or not: it's an obvious atrocity that Nazis rule it. When their troops attack, the aesthetic of it is not serene, nor is it something that happens outside of our viewport. We fight a war against them, and when they burn our resistance compound to the ground, we end up right there with the flames licking at our boots.

There is one section of Superliminal where it feels as though we are marching into the path of danger, followed by a perspective change which demonstrates that sometimes, the monster is in our heads. In the fourth chapter, we walk darkened rooms that appear to descend into a nightmare. A thick red substance smears the walls and floors, and in one lobby, we can see the shape of a human head lurking behind a door. But the red liquid? Just paint. And that figure in the door? A chess piece balanced on top of a cardboard box. By throwing ourselves into the problem, instead of recoiling from it, we get enough information about it that we can see that the threat was an illusion.

It's a constructive mental health exercise. But no other section in the game plays out like this, except perhaps for the indefinite dream loop. We rappel out of that nightmare into a painting of a blue sky. Most of Superliminal is completing tonally neutral puzzles while a voice in our ears tells us that things are relatively bad or relatively good.

It's also rare that any action we take in the game is what gets us out of trouble, which is an issue if you're trying to convince your audience of their ability to overcome their troubles. During one scene, SomnaSculpt's protocol tells us to cause a dream-destroying event to rescue ourselves from disaster, but we don't have a verb to do that. Eventually, just moving through the exits, we're told that the glitch has corrected itself, and the protocol merits us with that fix. I think it's meant to be a joke that no one could blame or credit us for these changes in fortune, but that this disembodied mind does it anyway. The game does have this habit of cracking upsettingly unfunny jokes, so it can be a little ambiguous when it's trying to be humorous. But if that is the gag, we take away from it that we don't get better outcomes in life by changing our perspective. Instead, we learn that calamities befall us and then resolve themselves outside of our control.

But perhaps my biggest problem with Superliminal as a "message game" is that its metaphors for real-life problem solving are so generalised that it doesn't adequately depict any of the topics it's talking about. I understand from Pillow Castle's game that I will achieve my goals if I resize the elements of my psyche. I want the right ones to take up a lot of space and the others to take up little space. But I don't leave with actionable advice on doing this because I don't know what elements should be what size inside my head. And the game never teaches me how to perform that perspective shift because the perspective shift in the gameplay never represents any particular psychological exercise a therapist might give us.

When I'm inflating the Moon or spinning a building block around, what psychological concepts do the Moon or building block symbolise? Even if they did represent something, how would I tell what layouts of my mental landscape get me to what goal when the game won't discuss specific goals? Every objective is just an exit door: the idea of a target rather than any identifiable element of our psyche. At a certain point, Superliminal also throws away what little metaphor it has to pursue mechanics that don't seem to represent anything.

Like, okay, when I'm shrinking an apple, there's a message there about not blowing problems in my life out of proportion, but what about the section where I can't grow objects, and I'm cloning them instead? Or what about when I'm placing chess pieces to make pits in the floor into solid ground? These mechanics don't match the game's opening statement about exaggerating failures or minimising serious issues. We could make up mental processes that these mechanics do fill in for, but those metaphors aren't present in the game's text.

Compare Superliminal's framing of its props and mechanics to that of Antichamber's. Antichamber is a game that gives us perspective-bending puzzles, and when we solve them, we get philosophical maxims that encapsulate those puzzles. These maxims usually muse about challenge, success, and failure. The first hurdle in Antichamber is a gap in the floor with a door on the other side. The pit is too wide for us to jump, but when we try and inevitably fail, we end up in front of a sign that says, "Failure to succeed is not failure to progress". We may then continue to the next challenge.

Another early room features two staircases to different floors, but taking either leads us right back to where we started. After we've tried both, we can read a placard that reminds us that two choices that lead to the same outcome are effectively the same choice. Antichamber is providing the kind of life lessons that Superliminal claims to. It can follow through where Superliminal can't because it's expounding in more detail about what its puzzles represent. Seriously, play Antichamber.

There is another framing that could have worked for Superliminal but that Pillow Castle ultimately abandoned. Originally, the game wasn't called Superliminal; it was called Museum of Simulation Technology. And there's that framing of the museum again. A museum exhibit doesn't necessarily require every piece within it to tell a cohesive narrative, work with one theme, or communicate one message. Galleries often host loosely related works bound together by artist, movement, or period. Works within these spaces are often appreciated more on their own merits than on their contribution to the overall exhibit.

Superliminal is less than the sum of its parts, but each of those parts is impeccably machined. I haven't even talked about some of the inventive late-game surprises like the silhouette of a staircase that turns out to be an opening in the wall or the time when we drop an object to make a platform only to have it shatter the ground under us. Hopefully, you can see how the puzzler might have been better received with a framing that focuses on the pieces rather than the whole.

But if we really want to understand Superliminal's framing, we have to take one more step back. Because, of course, any criticism of a video game, including this one I'm writing, also adopts a frame. And I'm making decisions about how I contextualise Superliminal here. I can't place it within any frame I want because how I feel about the game is somewhat out of my control, and certain arguments about the title wouldn't make sense.

Nonetheless, I and all other commentators do have multiple framings to pick from when describing media or elements of that media. I said that Superliminal's base ideas are ripe with potential but that it doesn't fulfil that potential. Yet, I could have put a more positive spin on it. I could have said that although Superliminal isn't gold from end to it, it's brimming with potential in its basic mechanics and premise. I wrote a lot about where Superliminal falls down and a little about where Antichamber succeeds, but this also could have been an essay about the genius of Antichamber with a little about the failures of Superliminal. None of these would have been the "correct" approach, nor is negative framing inferior to positive. Yet, if we are to take the lessons of Superliminal forward, then we must see that our feelings about a game and which aspects of it we dwell on are partly a matter of the frame we choose. Thanks for reading.

Fabulous piece, great analysis!