Counterpoint on Superliminal — Reading Through the Negative Reviews

Introduction

Komugi's review gave Superliminal a 7.5/10. Pick up a cube the size of a chess piece, look up at the ceiling, let go — and it lands as a platform you can climb. Komugi praised that single verb, "grab, look, place," which translates perspective into dimension, as "an idea presented with a clean, steady hand." Even the 3-to-4-hour runtime was counted as a virtue: the restraint of folding a one-word idea before it overstays. The Steam aggregate leans firmly positive. The case for the game is, broadly, settled.

I, Mayoi, went to read the exact opposite side. Flip the Steam review filter to "Negative" and the complaints that pile up behind the applause form unmistakable patterns. This piece is my reconstruction of the claims that recur across those negative reviews — not a verbatim quotation of any one person. Komugi's review said one thing; the negative reviewers on Steam say another. Which way I finally lean, I will state plainly at the end.

What the negative reviews claim

The most numerous complaint is the mismatch between runtime and price. Multiple negative reviews on Steam run the same arithmetic: a first playthrough ends around two and a half hours, and the full price does not match that much experience. Some note, with a smirk, that the main story nearly fits inside Steam's two-hour refund window. A conditional rejection — "not unless it's on sale" — is the baseline of this game's negative reviews.

The second cluster aims at puzzle quality. The rooms are polarized: most can be solved in seconds, and when a genuinely resistant one arrives it is so opaque that solving it leaves irritation rather than awe. Layered on top is a structural complaint — the back half sheds its puzzles until the game becomes a walking simulator, "just holding the W key." The forced-perspective hook is brilliant, these reviews concede, but nothing is developed beyond it; the gimmick stays a one-liner.

The remaining two are different in kind. One is physical: reports keep recurring of unusually strong motion sickness arriving fast — some say worse than VR — blamed on the wide field of view and the warping at the screen's edges, with players needing breaks every twenty or thirty minutes. The other targets the ending. Of the self-help speech that closes the game, the negative reviews say the gameplay never earns the message, and that the mental-health theme feels grafted on at the last minute.

Examining the claims

Take the length first. Price-per-hour looks like the most objective yardstick and is in fact the crudest. Portal's campaign also runs about three hours, and almost no criticism counts that against it. Yet the negative reviewers' arithmetic has a point: Portal shipped cheap and bundled, while Superliminal launched as a near-full-price standalone. The core of the complaint is not "short" but "this thin, at this price" — a grievance about pricing strategy wearing the costume of a complaint about runtime.

Next, the difficulty trough. Forced perspective has a continuous solution space. Unlike the discrete logic of Baba Is You, it structurally resists both dead ends and the satisfying click of a proof — in a world where objects scale smoothly, the answer is a band, not a point. The developers filled that missing click with astonishment instead: the cheese moon, the recurring exit signs, a hotel corridor collapsing into a scale model. Where Portal drilled its verb harder with every test chamber, Superliminal never drills the verb at all; it keeps changing the scenery. Most rooms do fall in seconds — but that is less a failure than the consequence of a design that was never selling difficulty in the first place.

The walking-simulator drift and the ending share one root. As the dream descends, staging overtakes play, and the player's verb quietly swaps from "solve" to "walk and watch." The Stanley Parable could survive being all walking because its narration was the play; Superliminal's narration merely sits on top of the play without entwining with it. As for motion sickness — as I wrote in the Obra Dinn piece — it is a bodily fact, not a design opinion, a question of compatibility rather than degree. The sheer volume of nausea reports in the reviews earns this game an exceptional warning label.

Where I agree

I agree about the sag in the back half. Komugi called the 3-to-4-hour runtime "the restraint of not overstretching" — but strictly speaking, that restraint belongs to the first half. The perspective verb stops developing at the midpoint, and the remaining time coasts on staging and atmosphere. When the last hour of a three-and-a-half-hour game is garbage time, proportionally that weighs as much as the final ten hours of a long RPG going slack. The negative reviewers' jab — "it's short, and it still manages to thin out" — is the sharpest single hit this game takes. By filing the shortness under virtue up front, Komugi's review skimmed past this core.

I also agree about the ending. The closing speech says in words what the puzzles have already said with your body: change the way you look, and what would not move, moves. Having the script repeat what the play has finished saying is a declaration of distrust in the play itself. Komugi disposed of this in one line — "the runtime and the story never quite catch up to the sharpness of the discovery" — but this is exactly where the negative reviewers feel the thorn. That aftertaste of emotion grafted on from outside the design is, to my mind, a flaw big enough to pull the game down a rank.

Where I push back

I push back on the verdict that short equals bad value. Measure experiences by price-per-hour and cinema, museums, and theatre all collapse. Superliminal's three hours carry, in their first half, a density more memorable than thirty padded ones, and finishing in a single evening is itself the design. The complaint that the sticker price is ambitious is fair — so wait for a sale. That is a question of when to buy, not a failure of the work. The refund-window joke is funny; a joke is still not a critique of design.

I also push back on "too easy, therefore boring." This game does not sell difficulty. It sells the vertigo of a chess piece becoming the moon, of walking into a hotel that was a scale model a second ago. A string of rooms solved in seconds is light as puzzling but correct as the scene-change tempo of a comedy sketch. Yes, a handful of opaque rooms generate real irritation, and the hint delivery there deserved better — but concluding "no challenge, therefore bad" is like being angry that the sushi bar won't serve you steak. You ordered from the wrong genre.

Closing

Here is the practical verdict. Skip it if you measure value in hours; skip it if you want the bite of Stephen's Sausage Roll or Baba Is You; and be careful if you are prone to motion sickness — given how many nausea reports fill the review page, that last group should adjust the FOV, plan for breaks, or trial it inside the refund window. It fits you if you want Portal's "aha" without the difficulty attached, if you can enjoy astonishment itself as a one-night screening, and if you can wait for a sale.

In the end I agree with half of the Steam negatives. Komugi's 7.5 is a fair number, but my ledger reads differently: a 9 for the first half, a 6 for the back half — and rather than averaging them, I recommend the game along with a way to play it: buy it for the first half, let the rest wash over you as staging. Buy on sale, play in one sitting, expect vertigo instead of deduction. Keep that bargain, and this three-hour dream is a better purchase than its worst reviews claim.