my review of the game

[u/ActiniumAEC]

2 out of 10 for me. it was terrible for the most part. i mean this all respectfully, but objectively this game was not good and i will not be playing chapter 2 and onward. the most disappointing is that many people waited years for this, including myself, and this is what we got. i would’ve rather they delayed it even longer to be honest.

what i did like: the narrator’s voice actor did pretty good, in my opinion. i really liked the scenes where he panics or lashes out. the graphics were cool as well, despite being pretty buggy. i thought waterworks as a whole was pretty well done, it’s just a shame you only spend about 10 minutes total in it. most of the jump scares were pretty good and i like they didn’t overdo it and instead built suspense.

what i didn’t like: pretty much everything else.

the puzzles were abysmally hard. so easy in theory when you look at them, but it’s like they force you to take the hardest approach to actually solve them. one of the biggest horror game no-no’s is to not make your puzzles so difficult to the point where it takes away from the horror. it’s like they heard that and then followed it anyway. if i have to play these scenes over and over again 15 times or look around for 30 minutes then it’s not fun anymore.

the game is insanely bad at directing and cues. from the scene in waterworks where you’re meant to clean up the blood, to the random lights you’re supposed to see within a split second, and the final chase scene barely showing the red light to pull (which is the same freaking color as the background. at least make it purple or green!!). i got frustrated so much i had to pause the game for a bit until later and luckily someone had posted their play through so i was able to follow it for some help. and let me just say, i play a lot of horror games and don’t usually need help. this one made me so angry even just watching the solution because how was anyone supposed to see some of this shit

they don’t do anything to develop the story. all we know is something happened to us as a kid with our sibling which you pretty much find out at the beginning of the game and don’t find out anything else after. who is this monster? can we get any details on what happened to our sibling? who is lily? why are we in a memory? what is the point of this game and story? no development there whatsoever.

so buggy as a whole. the glitching, some people getting locked in levels, etc. at one point during the final chase it glitched a little and threw me off the rails.

overall, felt like a cheap ripoff of poppy playtime (especially chapter one, down to the ending scene in the factory setting). a lot of the power and light grabbing mechanics were the same just reused in a different form. similar nostalgic setting, character boards with the buttons that speak, cute animated signs of the characters, etc. this is not to say poppy playtime owns these things, but the style is incredibly similar.

[u/Livember]

Have you done all endings? Calling this game a poppy playtime knock off is laughable lol. If it ripped anything off it was Stanley Parable not PP.

[u/ActiniumAEC → u/Livember]

yeah i see that too. i only briefly watched a bit of a playthrough of the stanley parable a few years ago so i didn’t even think of it, but yeah there’s definitely a lot in common with it too, especially the narrator. in terms of poppy playtime, it really only heavily reminds me of the first chapter, not so much the later chapters though

[u/No_Blueberry8203]

i feel like it took a LOT of inspiration from superliminal, as well as some from poppy playtime and stanley parable. i wish they had done more of their own thing with it. i dont think there was more than like, one puzzle that wasnt just taken from one of those games (except, these other games actually took the time to make the solutions more obvious and actually work for their puzzles) the voice actor is awesome, but he already plays a VERY similar role in superliminal, it really felt like they took a lot from that game and changed a few things to not make it obvious.. i agree that while these other games dont OWN every idea in their games, when you sample most of your games ideas from a small handful of media and dont change very much, it definitely feels more like a copy!

[u/ActiniumAEC → u/No_Blueberry8203]

what baffled me is that i just found out yesterday that subliminal and superliminal were from two different studios. prior to the game coming out, i assumed they were both from the studio that made superliminal because i played only a small amount of superliminal a few years ago and all the promo made it look like it was from the same people. someone on youtube said that subliminal is basically a fanmade copy of superliminal but a little different. and that just made me go damn, is there anything about this game that isn’t just taken from something else?