While the clean lines and colours used felt reminiscent of many Unity games, it was warm and inviting in a familiar childlike kind of way. Putting smaller objects into this kind of perspective made them feel important, sometimes implying a secondary purpose.

These books made some of the smallest trinkets or ordinary stationery feel larger than life, and I’d often wonder if that’s how an ant would feel. The brightly lit, colourful arrangements of tchotchkes created little worlds that I could stare at for hours at a time, finding more and more layers of detail. Using ordinary, and often out of place, objects to solve puzzles and traverse different dreams reminded me of books I loved as a kid - the I Spy series. Giggling and gasping at how I could enlarge a wedge of Edam cheese to form a ramp to the next area. I progressed into the next few rooms, playing around with the mechanics as they’re introduced. Part of me hoped that you could leave without signing and get an ‘over before it begins’ kind of ending – not this time, but still a cute gag nonetheless. Upon turning around, I found the terms of service and signed. I’m dropped into a beige room, with some control explanations printed on the wall. Oh boy, this was already promising to be a good time. The opening cinematic starts off in a conventional way, and abruptly shifts to a Tom Goes to the Mayor-style line about the Pierce Institute being “located right next to the secondary overflow parking lot at the University Medical Centre”.

Even the concept of being placed in a building block testing scenario is something I’m somewhat familiar with, given my childhood fascination (and sometimes intense fear) of Intelligent Qube. But that game, along with LSD: Dream Emulator are two examples of using sleep as a motif in very different ways. When I wrote about Hypnospace Outlaw last time, I hadn’t made the connection with sleep and dreams as one of the themes that would draw me to it in the first place. Everything about it spoke to me – the soft jazz piano, the mash-up of Frasurbane and Utopian Scholastic interiors, and the somewhat self-aware writing of Dr. I downloaded it immediately and jumped right in.

I watched the trailer, wanting to slap myself for forgetting about the development of this game after so long. Several years and various stages of the pandemic passed, and towards the end of a 107 day lockdown in October last year, I found Superliminal on sale on the eShop. I was blown away, this is pretty much what I wanted to do! If only I’d kept in touch with my team (sorry Rob, Frank and Thomas!) and kept developing our game like we planned! It looked promising, and I hoped there’d be a game based on the mechanic one day. It probably sounds like a dozen games now, but when we made the alpha in 2011, it seemed pretty exciting.Ī couple of years after graduation, I was shown a tech demo where the player could resize objects based on perspective. Now that I think of it, I can probably trace this back to my major project from when I was studying game design – a first person, physics-based puzzle game where a young woman is caught in limbo trying to resolve past traumas before she can rest. I recently realised I’m a huge sucker for games that deal with dreams, or just the concept of sleep in general.

Superliminal ending speech