Superliminal review: Experimentation with a fresh perspective

At one point in Superliminal the moon came to my aid. I was stuck in a room somewhere with no exits. Up above me I could see the moon through an open skylight, so I grabbed it and brought it down to earth. And then...

I put the moon up front with this because I hate to open with a quote straight off. Anyway, now we've had the moon, here's Nathaniel Hawthorne on dreams. Hawthorne's ambition was "to write a dream". He meant: "a dream which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistencies, its eccentricities and aimlessness - with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole." Tough gig? Quite. "Up to this old age of the world, no such thing has never been written."

Superliminal certainly gives it a go. It is not, in truth, particularly dreamlike a lot of the time, but it is set amongst dreams - in a sort of dream laboratory in which you are thoroughly lost. And it pulls a lot of dreamlike tricks. Superliminal is all about perspectives. Let's say there's a room with a door halfway up the wall that you really want to get through. You have a little wooden block in your hand. If you can position the block so it looks big enough to climb upon to get to that door - voila! The block will be big enough. Perspective is reality here.

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