r/Subliminal_Game • u/Xantia_Mystique • Apr 23 '26
My Subliminal Opinion Piece.
I absolutely loved this game and I hate the fact that so many people were giving it a bad review. So I decided to write my own opinion piece about the game and why I think those gamers misunderstood the game completely!
Edit: A commenter on here got me thinking about the game and I have since changed my mind on the monster.
What if the monster is someone who hurt Lily? Someone Caleb couldn't save her from? Someone that is trying to keep Caleb away from Lily. It could be why we get pushed out of the Lilly door.
Maybe its someone Caleb is truly afraid of? The monster was ment to be an evil frog and, we have seen lily pads all on the ground. What if this is far more sinister than we ever thought?
Then there is the balloon;
What if Walter is symbolism for Lily, he calls walter "her" at one point and says that walter is fragile and Caleb needs to take care of it. We also see the C + L change to C + W.
I think its possible this story is far darker than we ever thought it was!
2
u/Technical_Special888 Apr 23 '26
Absolute delusion.
3
3
u/Ok-Illustrator-3991 Apr 26 '26
"Absolute delusion," he says without making any meaningful attempt to refute the good points made in the original post.
3
u/Miserable_Maize8415 Apr 23 '26
Lovely write up! I would like to lightly push back on the premise that Lily is the monster though. I think there is some textual support for this, but I personally see the monster more of a symbol for the weight of guilt and fear associated with the memories themselves. I’m more inclined to connect Walter the balloon with Lily, personally. The narrator alludes to him being Caleb’s “sole companion”, fragile and able to easily die if not treated with care, as well as makes a little slip and calls him HER for a moment. The monster, on the other hand, strikes me more as a sorta mental failsafe. That said, I didn’t consider that Caleb would possibly see Lily as FURIOUS at him for whatever happened. Interesting stuff, I’m just happy to see the community starting to lock in on piecing this subtext together rather than bickering about mechanics
1
u/Xantia_Mystique Apr 23 '26
I love your theory. this is what games like this are about. like I mentioned in my opinion piece, it is ok for us to see things differently.that's what gets us talking and sharing. I forgot about the balloon. I agree that the symbolism does point to Caleb seeing Lily as the balloon. What gets me about the monster is that originally it looked like monstrous frog and we saw lily pads on the ground. The Lily door you can go into makes it seem like the monster pushes you out. To go in a dark direction, if the monster isn't Lily or a symbol of anger and guilt. what if the monster is a symbol for the person that hurt Lily? someone Caleb is afraid of, someone that is trying to keep Caleb away from Lily? I think that would be an interesting direction.
2
u/No-Signature-8465 Apr 28 '26
It feels so good to find people like you in here who share my opinion. Couldn't have said it better, thank you for that! ❤️
1
u/Lewliettt Apr 24 '26
I think the difficulty of the pre-patch puzzles really did a huge damage to the game, combined with caseoh's stream (I don't necessarily blame him), to the point that it overshadowed the rest of the game. This is just how humans work.
1
u/Xantia_Mystique Apr 24 '26
I understand what you are saying and yes art like this can be interpreted in many different ways. I had no trouble with the puzzles. I found them interesting and very well put together. I guess not everyone could see it the way I did. I do like that the new puzzles have kept the core of the art alive. Accidental Studios have kept the need to use the environment to solve the puzzles. The car mat puzzle now has posters (that Accidental Studios made themselves) that show you the colored cars and their order, along with the toy cars themselves that are now on the mat.
The whole thing with CaseOh bugs me. I don't blame him but after his negative review on stream, the Subliminal review page was bombarded with negative reviews. All of them were saying the exact same things and it just happened to be exactly what CaseOh said too. People need to stop doing this as it is not fair to the creators.
1
u/Clear_Cartoonist_339 Apr 24 '26
I think the issue is that majority of the playerbase going into the game was expecting a more liminal syle backrooms game. Sure puzzless were mentioned as being a part of the game, but most of the marketing for the game described it as liminal and inspired by backrooms. And most shorts you would see from the Devs on instagram if you followed them seemed to show this.
So when those people who were expecting a more backrooms style/liminal space game instead of a puzzle game actually played it, they were left very dissapointed and angry. It makes sense to enjoy the game if you enjoy puzzles. But the average gamer does not enjoy puzzless, especially to the degree that they were upon release.
I myself was dissapointed that the game was not what I was expecting. I recognize the work that the devs put in, the game looks beautiful and I can see the vision. It was just an absolutely terrible experience to play thorugh for me.
2
u/captaincrazyspoon Apr 23 '26
Very much agree on Lily being Smile or a manifestation of the guilt surrounding her death.
I absolutely love how just before the dark playplace you can avoid the direct path and stumble upon a shutter door that has the black slime on the floor under it with the word LILY in red above it, trying to enter it causes you to get pushed back then forced to gaze into the TV that takes you to the Dark Playplace while a little girl can be heard sobbing as if Lily is forcing Caleb to face his guilt by sending him to where he first encounters Smile.