![]() ![]() In Superliminal, size often becomes irrelevant because anything you can pick up can effectively take on any volume. Any two locations you can link with a portal effectively have a distance of 0 between them, even if they are on the other side of a chamber from each other. In Portal, the distance between entities in play often becomes irrelevant. Superliminal's base mechanic is like Portal's in that you can immediately understand it from a short demonstration, yet it completely changes how you think about objects relating to space. This trailer features the mechanic in action: If you lift a chess piece off of a table and hold it up in front of you, so it looks like it fills the whole room, when you let go of it, it will fill the entire room. The twist is that when you place an object back down, it will stay as large as it appeared in your view when you dropped it. Of course, how big these items look compared to the room is a matter of perspective. Pillow Castle's 2019 puzzler allows us to pluck objects from our surroundings and wave them around in front of our faces. The closest we've gotten was the debut of Superliminal. We've not quite ever returned to that flashpoint where it felt we were looking at the future of the genre. ![]() Some recent cube-and-switch adventures have edged out from Portal's orbit more successfully than others, but we've never had a repeat of that moment in 2006 when Valve first showed their experimental brainteaser. That is unless they can figure out how to evolve the Portal genotype and not simply replicate it. ![]() But if they blithely import all of Portal's lessons, they risk making an also-ran. Now, if developers create environmental puzzle games as they did before Portal, their material often looks dated by comparison. You had this cult hit that revolutionised puzzle design, audiovisual representation of puzzle elements, and narrative delivery. Specifically, many PC/console puzzle games must answer the question "What comes after Portal?". Because many modern puzzles games incorporate large chunks of Portal, you need to talk about Valve's work to review them in full. The thing is, the elephant in the room doesn't get any smaller for us ignoring it. So, I don't want to do the same thing with video games: to reduce this storied and vibrant galaxy of experiences to one or two stars. A generation of filmmakers and audiences ends up with a much smaller film vocabulary and misses out on a lot of cool art. If we only deconstruct Marvel films, we get the impression that they are the be-all and end-all of the medium. Still, by discussing the whole craft of cinema in relation to a single franchise, these writers present only a tiny square of the medium's great tapestry. It's positive that there are on-ramps to understanding films that hold up popular entertainment for reference. There's a current trend of film articles to explore cinematic tropes and techniques predominantly or purely through the lens of Marvel movies. However, if we want to learn about games as a medium and not just a few examples of the form, we can't keep coming back to the same reference material. You can see why: It's an accessible point of reference because both writer and audience are likely to be intimately familiar with Portal. We don't seem to be able to get away from Valve's mind-bending cognitive exam every new PC and console game in the genre is inevitably and extensively compared to it. Note: This article includes major spoilers for Superliminal and Wolfenstein: The New Order, and minor spoilers for Portal and Antichamber.Įven fourteen years on from its release, everyone discussing puzzle games is still talking about Portal. ![]()
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