Best Gameplay

I've played a lot of games, on my Backloggd Profile alone there are currently 581 games listed that I could remember off the top of my head when I was filling it out, I am sure there are many more that I have forgotten or overlooked. It's hard to show me a game now with mechanics that I haven't seen before, I am intrigued by novelty and game mechanics that leave me wondering how the developer managed to pull it off. Superliminal is one such game, the core mechanic revolves around perspective, where your perception of objects determines their size, if they look big they become big, and if they look small, they become small, this opens up an intriguing world of possibilities for 3D puzzle solving and exploration.

When I was a kid I was asked what I wanted to be when I grow up and at the time there were quite a few ideas that spun around inside my head. For a time I wanted to be a chef, and I learned all I could from my Mum, my Aunt, and my Grandmother. I eventually got to attend an open day at a catering college and quickly learned the industrial production of food was worlds apart from preparing it in your own kitchen. My other major interest was computing, first learning to program in BASIC on an old Amstrad CPC-464 that an uncle picked up second hand. I eventually tailored my education to focus on computing, first with ICT in High School, and later with Software Development in College, before finally attending University and studying for a degree in Computer Science with Games Technology.

I took the advice of a teacher who once said to take something you love and turn it into your career and your work will never feel like a job - that advice was horrible in the end, the reality is that when you turn your hobby into a career you take your enjoyment out of it, you don't think of your job as a hobby, you think of your hobby as work. It becomes impossible to separate the two, leaving you without the release and the enjoyment that you once got out of it. I often describe studying Games Technology as seeing the fourth wall, you get to see behind the curtain and realise how everything is done and the performance loses its magic, you no longer see a fairy dance across the sky, you see an actor on cables suspended above a stage.

It took many years after graduating in 2009 for me to eventually return to gaming with a passion and the ability to extract joy from it once more, a big part of that came from the advancement of technology. When the complexity of games progressed to a point where developers were doing new and interesting things and I could once again look with wonder in ignorance and could only speculate, that was when my happiness to game returned.

There have been a few titles in the last 10 or so years that have made waves across multiple genres for their innovation, and Superliminal is one. If I really sat down and devoted time and effort I could probably figure out a rough idea of how the game is actually programmed, but I haven't done that. Ignorance is bliss and in this case that bliss affords me the enjoyment of one of the best 3D puzzle games I've ever played. The soundtrack was a contender for best game soundtrack, it was also a contender for my favourite art style but in the end I went with different games for each. At its core, Superliminal is a game that revolves around its innovative game mechanic, the "ah-ha!" moments of realisation, the well balanced difficulty and evenly paced progression, and a story that is surprisingly compelling for the genre.

It won't surprise you to know this is another game in my library that I have 100%'d and unlocked every achievement. That was genuinely fun and an interesting journey, I highly recommend.