Partly this conflict is a dissonance around responsibility. But If there’s no integration, the comedy and the deep-and-meaningful can clash in really awkward ways. It’s not impossible – the most obvious route is to show how the comedy or goofiness is somehow implicated in that deeper revelation, as in (for instance) Bo Burnham’s famous ‘ Can’t Handle This‘. Its transition back into serious deep-and-meaningful psychological revelation is a tough one. In the case of Superliminal, then, when it sets up a wacky Portal-esque narrative, people expect a certain set of roughly proximal events. Surprise and subversion and shocking twists all have their place within a narrative ecosystem, and we expect them to behave in certain ways, even when we don’t anticipate their arrival. It’s more about the broader structure of narrative as a whole. The expectation is that plot twists are unexpected.Īll of this is just to say that expectation, as a concept, is not about your moment to moment experience. You hear people complain sometimes that a plot twist was too obvious – that they saw it coming a mile away. Even the plot twist exists within a framework of expectation. To put that another way, the audience expects that they will not understand until the end. But they do expect that the story will eventually resolve with the killer’s unmasking and defeat. In a murder mystery, they don’t need to know who the killer is from the start. And that’s not to say that the audience has to know everything that’s going to happen. When you’re in a given genre, people expect a series of events that fits with the broader group. It’s the same root word as ‘generic’ and ‘gender’ – it’s about categories, types, groups of things. That’s the etymological root of the word ‘genre’ – it comes from the Latin genus, meaning ‘class’ or ‘kind’. The way that we understand texts is through reference to other texts – through the repetition of motifs and story elements making up a particular type of tale. If you’re playing a Portal game, you expect a song at the end. If you’re watching science fiction, you expect spaceships and technology. When we talk about genre, we’re really talking about the expectations that the audience brings to a piece of fiction. How does fiction move between moods? How do you handle that kind of shift in a way that’s compelling rather than jarring? Is there something that we can identify Superliminal as potentially missing, something that can help us understand genre and mood more broadly? Part of the initial conversation would have to be about expectation. It’s a bit of a mood shift – which is not bad, necessarily, but it’s definitely – it’s noticeable.īut okay, let’s stay with that for a minute. The story’s got kind of a Portal thing going, too – you’re a dreamer who’s accidentally stumbled into a sleep therapy dream, and nobody totally knows where you are or how to get you out, and when they do figure it out the computer turns on you and won’t let you escape – Portal vibes, right? And yet by the end of the game, you’re listening to rising strings, those soft angelic sounds that signal transcendence and enlightenment, while a doctor tells you how you’ve successfully overcome your self-doubt and proven your ability to cope in the world. Following in the footsteps of Demruth’s 2013 Antichamber, it features puzzles based around forced-perspective. Superliminal is a 2019 surreal puzzle game from Pillow Castle.
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