Subliminal

“The story is unintuitive and if you take a mental note of details that appear to be useful to the story, you'd be wasting your brainpower, as they typically don't matter at all.”

“The story itself doesn't make sense, and the entire game is just puzzles aside from a couple chase scenes.”

“My biggest gripe comes from the frustration of aimlessly meandering around for 2 more hours than the story took to complete, Subliminal is a 1 hour long game extended to 3 hours because of listlessly wandering around trying to figure out what event trigger needs interacting with to progress the story.”

“The gameplay mechanics don't really make themselves apparent until you eventually run out of literally anything else to do in order to progress, not to mention the game seems to be confused if it is a mascot horror or a liminal game.”

“The puzzle mechanics are generic and sometimes give you no indication that some mechanics even exist. The game lacked proper introduction to its mechanics, you will encounter different types of puzzles but nothing would somehow clue or even give an idea to what it is.”

“If they fixed the problems with the puzzles, like some being just getting lucky enough to notice some random item through a crack in the wall, all the backtracking, the janky mechanics that don't work right away and often end up making it so you do the correct solution and feel like an idiot for 20 minutes trying different things until the mechanic just suddenly decides to work, it would be an amazing game, but for most players the points I make above just make the game exhausting to get through, it becomes almost traumatizing how unreasonable some puzzles become and buggy mechanics driving you insane as well, not to mention the unstable chase scenes that you run once and get caught, then run again, ending up slower and don't, why?”

“The atmosphere is immediately killed with the narrator blabbering over everything, as well as a clock that is so out of place with it looking at you once you turn your back that it feels more like a really cliché gimmick rather than something that makes you feel uneasy.”

“But once you reach the playplace and the obtuse puzzles plus chase sections start, that atmosphere gets thrown straight in the trash.”

“The amount of puzzles ruined the eerie atmosphere it laid out in the beginning.”

“Actualization: this game is horribly optimized, almost unplayable with an RTX 3050 6GB DLSS performance 1080p medium preset running around 30fps, dropping to the 20s sometimes.”

“Extremely poor performance and momentum-killing trial-and-error chase sequences... I have an RTX 3060 and even on lowest settings I was getting maybe 5 fps in some later areas of the game.”

“The worst complaint I have for this game besides its puzzles is the graphics optimizations and screen tearing. I have an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and expected to run everything on max 'unreasonable' graphics settings, but I could not.”

“The gameplay consists of being killed by cheap jumpscares or invisible timers, forcing you to replay the same tedious segments over and over again.”

“Most of the puzzles are genuinely frustrating and tedious.”

“The chase scenes sprinkled throughout the game are also tedious, and rely heavily on trial-and-error gameplay.”

“First time loading the game it freezes and I have to restart; screen goes black out of nowhere during the intro. Trying to restart makes the screen very bright, restarting the whole game still has the same issue with the screen going black while the guy is talking.”

“If they fixed the problems with the puzzles, like some being just getting lucky enough to notice some random item through a crack in the wall, all the backtracking, the janky mechanics that don't work right away and often end up making it so you do the correct solution and feel like an idiot for 20 minutes trying different things until the mechanic just suddenly decides to work... it would be an amazing game, but for most players the points I make above just make the game exhausting to get through. It becomes almost traumatizing how unreasonable some puzzles become and buggy mechanics driving you insane as well, not to mention the unstable chase scenes that you run once and get caught, then run again, ending up slower and don't, why?”

“Unfortunately the game is unplayable in its state. I'm not saying this to be a hater; it genuinely is very buggy and some mechanics of the game don't work and the paths to continue to the next part of the story are just not there sometimes.”

“Not to mention the playplace section where you need to keep the fun meter filled has the most grating music playing; I had to take my headphones off due to getting a migraine since it wasn't clear on the alternate pathway you could take, causing me to fail over and over again.”

“The game almost feels soulless at times, commonly missing perfect opportunities to include some kind of musical aspect, even in the chase scenes.”

“Waited 3 extra years for this, ew, puzzles are lame af, the audio is meh, all the cool areas you get blocked from going, the game has barely any OST, it's glitchy and wtf is the final level, that is the worst level in a.”

“Lack of replayability makes getting the other endings somewhat tedious, and due to there only being one 'canon' ending, it feels like a waste of time.”

“Not super replayable but it's a story game that does its job well with the narrator from Stanley Parable.”

“While the puzzles will probably not result in much replayability, the game has many alternating paths and hidden items.”

“I gotta say though, the advertising on the Steam page is pretty misleading.”

“Don't waste it on turning this game into a cash grab (or a slopfest).”

“When I bought this drag of a game I expected a creepy liminal backrooms game like they were advertising.”