LIMINAL WATERS

“Only has three graphics options: ultra high end, normal, and potato mode, with no further tweaking possible.”

“Very few settings, no interaction, graphics are flat, and items are stacked 2D images.”

“I streamed the game for my YouTube channel (I have 64GB of RAM and a 5090), and my stream frequently froze because I couldn't play in windowed mode. The graphics, even on normal instead of ultra, severely lagged my computer.”

“One thing, after a couple hours of playing and never having to do anything but look around, it hits you with a new mechanic: you have to go back and grab something and take it somewhere to proceed. At this point, there has been nothing of the sort in the game. It's not hard to figure out if you have a gamer brain, but it's so random to not introduce that way earlier in the game. There were also awful endless sections of just walking in a straight line for no reason.”

“Another one of these levels suddenly introduces a puzzle mechanic, which you do not encounter for the entirety of the game and left me confused for quite a bit before I realized what I had to do.”

“Update to my originally glowing review: the game starts off (levels 1-3) as a great liminal/backrooms game, but halfway through the experience, parkour mechanics are employed as a last-gasp measure to add difficulty to the end of some later levels (e.g., to reach the exits of some levels, one must execute tedious parkour challenges). This is partially remedied by the fact that one can access any level from the menu.”

“Also please let me control the volume of the SFX and music separately; the water was always splashing too loud.”

“But the music... I hate to be that person, but the music really takes away from the creepy liminal element.”

“And you can't turn it off, the music and sound are together in one setting.”

“It's got some issues though, mostly performance issues related to lag and general slowness, sometimes the audio cuts in and out, and the biggest flaw is that there's no save feature or checkpoints.”

“Overall, while I really like this game, it's not perfect. Making the game more optimized and allowing the player to save their progress would have improved my opinion a lot.”

“Performance is on the heavy side since there is no FSR, DLSS, or resolution option.”

“While I think the game has a strong start, especially those first six levels, and is visually stellar from start to finish, the later levels just feel like the developer has kind of lost the plot on what made the early game so special, memorable, and a joy to explore. The level design later on severely suffers because of that lack of focus.”

“I think the sound design does a lot of the heavy lifting for the unsettling atmosphere, but that is to be expected in a walking simulator of this genre with no storytelling.”

“The storytelling, though vague and obscure, adds to the surreal and esoteric feel of the game.”

“On the 2nd stage, pressing 'E' repeatedly at the keycard in the boiler room is very buggy; it won't even pick up the card.”

“I don't understand why every other Liminal game I've played had a save feature, but this one doesn't, which is frustrating when your game freezes or crashes, or you just want to take a break and pick up where you left off without having to play the entire level all over again.”

“It becomes a tedious walking simulator rather than a horror game.”

“Update to my originally glowing review: the game starts off (levels 1-3) as a great liminal/backrooms game, but halfway through, parkour mechanics are employed as a last-gasp measure to add difficulty to the end of some later levels. For example, to reach the exits of some levels, one must execute tedious parkour challenges. This is partially remedied by the fact that one can access any level from the menu.”