REVIEW ORIGINALLY WRITTEN AND POSTED ON JANUARY 2ND 2023

I took this game as a suggestion from a good friend of mine. He doesn’t play games avidly, but he had some good words to say regarding Superliminal, and I just so happened to find it was on sale.

I didn’t really know what I was walking into with Superliminal, the game really went under my radar, I think that I might have seen about a second clip of one of the first rooms with the giant chess pieces and that was about it. All that I knew going into it was that it was a puzzle game, and that part on top of my pals comment is really what caught me with this game.

When the game starts, you’re greeted with your traditional set of hallways, creating some space between the starting point, and the first puzzle. Well, I don’t even know if it was a puzzle, because what I didn’t know was that I could grab that chess piece from the opposite side of the room and then suddenly make it MASSIVE. I just walked past it, and the game was like “by the way…”. The main gimmick of Superliminal is to play around with the interactable items in the levels, and use depth perception to create platforms and traverse through the rooms of the institute, eventually finding your own path, and breaking the flow that the curators have intended for you, eventually twisting the “reality” that’s been created for you.

With each chapter, it starts very similarly, waking up to an alarm clock, the time progressing with every revisit, and the scenery making a change with it. You might revisit the institution from the first lap, or you might find yourself as a guest to a luxurious dinner hall. I think that one of the best parts about the level design with this game, which goes hand-in-hand with the overall moral of the game, and it creates an entirely fresh scenario, which nearly brings it into a psychological horror realm of freaky when you throw in the audio design, and the use of dimming the lights in what I think was a recreation of one of the very first stages, suddenly it became my favorite section in the game.

I can speak plenty of praises on the overall design of the game, and I’ve spoken some praises on the use of depth perception in this game, but playing the whole game in one sitting might have soured my stance on it when you ONLY really solve puzzles with depth perception, and often the same type of puzzle. Doing the same tricks to solve very similar puzzles became tedious approaching the halfway point in this game, but luckily, there is a redemption period of the game, being able to manipulate the players size in order to solve the puzzles using a loop of doorways was a nice little wrench in the works to keep me interested until the very end.

As I mentioned, the moral of the story falls into place with the puzzles that you solve in the game, as well as the story that the game tells you in the background over the speakers and radios in the game, but if you’re looking to give this game a try, I shall leave it ambiguous, and up to you to play the game yourself to discover what I mean.

Superliminal is a nice puzzle game experience that you can either pad out for the long haul, or decide to speedrun your way through, as the game developers seem to encourage. The game gets a 5/10 from me right now, and should I decide to run for the platinum, it’ll receive a ridiculous amount of chess pieces later…

Without a doubt, one of the most classic RPG Maker games. The story of Amayado Bus Stop is very well-crafted; it's almost like a little horror tale in the form of a game.

You control the protagonist named Chitose, a little girl who is bullied at school. One day, when she's on her way home, she ends up meeting Kobato. Kobato is a very reserved and mysterious girl, unlike Chitose, who is cheerful, sweet, innocent, and quite optimistic despite everything she suffers at school.

During the game, themes like bullying and some Japanese legends were addressed, and the game also had all those elements present in almost all classic RPG Maker games.

I find it a bit difficult to believe that someone reading this review doesn't know this game, but in case you don't know it yet or have never played it, you can easily find it to download with translations and everything.

It's a very cool story that brings me great nostalgia from my pre-teen years, where I was simply in love with this type of game.

I never finished this game as a kid, so I picked it up when I saw it cheap at my local retro games store. And... I don't know what it was about this game, but I devoured it. I was genuinely addicted. It was a good game, but I also hated it. When my mind drifted, it went to Picross. When I closed my eyes, all I saw were Picross blocks. The sounds were stuck in my ears ever ringing... ever ringing. I wanted to be free of the pain. But I owed my younger self to see it through to the end. This was unfinished business. And for my younger self, I did it. Every puzzle solved. Every fake block destroyed. The demon was slain, and all that was left was regret for every minute lost.

In all seriousness, the game's aight. It's a fairly charming puzzle game that adds a unique twist to an existing franchise. There isn't much in terms of variety, and most of the puzzles are solved using similar methods. It does, however, offer a huge amount of puzzles for the player to solve. It also has a fun side mode where you can create and solve your own puzzles, adding some replay value to a game that lacks it otherwise. Unfortunately, you are no longer able to share puzzles online, but you can share them locally with friends, for whatever that's worth. The music got a little repetitive, and some of the later puzzles genuinely seemed to ask the player to make some guesswork, but it was never super frustrating. If you decide to play this game, however, do yourself a favor and don't play it the way I did. The game is not meant to be binged over a few days; you'd do much better to piecemeal the puzzles over a much longer period of time while playing other games. Regardless, it's fun. If you can pick it up cheap, I'd recommend it. Just be aware that you may get sucked in, and blessings be upon you if that happens.

Finally completed after 20 years !
As a kid I couldn't save the game because I had no memory card for my n64.
So I used to play the first three tracks in loop. I remember the third one being very difficult.

Now I played the game discovering one more track (+ one secret one). More cars and reverse tracks. With different weather !

But I must admit that it gets repetitive and quite frustrating. So I decided to stop after year 1 unlocking one secret car and the secret track. I could play year 2 3 and 4. But I prefer to try other games.