Subliminal Review — Repressed Memory

Dive deep into the darkest parts of your mind in Subliminal, a psychological horror game all about uncovering your deepest, most repressed memories, even when the voice in your head begs you not to.

If you take a look at the Steam page for Subliminal, you’ll see that the game is currently sitting at mixed reviews at the time of writing this review. While I definitely experienced some issues during my playthrough of the first, and currently only, released episode, I’ll admit that I don’t see what everyone is so upset about. Granted, I played the game about a week after its release, so there may have been patches and fixes that addressed much of what players felt was wrong with it since then. Whatever the reason, I can say with confidence that the game isn’t as bad as some of the Steam reviews make it out to be.

Subliminal plays in a pretty familiar fashion compared to a lot of indie horror games: it’s a first-person game where you explore some thoughtfully designed areas and solve puzzles to advance further, dealing with some rather scary situations in the process. Mechanically speaking, Subliminal doesn’t deviate far from the traditional indie horror formula, and so there isn’t anything revolutionary or hard to understand about it in this area.

The puzzles, however, are pretty smartly designed, with a lot of them using light as a thematic element. I can’t say what the concept of light really has to do with the game’s overall theme, but the puzzles themselves are well-designed and require a good amount of attention and deductive reasoning without being unnecessarily hard or feeling “cheap” in their solutions.

Subliminal‘s overall theme is repressed childhood trauma. As you venture back into your memories to collect “happiness,” you uncover a series of disturbing events locked in your psyche that the voice in your head would rather you forget.

While playing the game, I felt as though I had a pretty clear understanding of what was going on, but in hindsight, there are definitely areas that don’t click so well and a lot left to discover. Since only half of the story has been released so far, I don’t really consider this a “negative,” and I will say that the game makes pretty good use of environmental storytelling to convey what might be happening without outright giving it away.

However, I will say that the monster, or monsters, of the game, which serve as a big source of the horror, clash with the overall themes at play. Subliminal wants to use the concept of liminal spaces and repressed trauma in its psychological horror, and yet, when it comes to its biggest moments of tension, it resorts to a mascot-horror-like creature that, while its origins are hinted at throughout the game, doesn’t really make a lot of sense or seem to fit. I’m hoping the second part of this story addresses this creature, or creatures (I’m pretty sure there are two of them), better so that their presence doesn’t feel so alien in the game.

Until we get that further context, I have to say that the inclusion of this creature, or these creatures if they are in fact two separate entities, feels like an attempt to appeal to fans of Poppy Playtime or Five Nights at Freddy’s, trying to capture the appeal of the mascot horror genre in a game that is otherwise not set up for it. I found the appearance of the creature you face in the majority of the game to be rather weird and disconnected from the setting. At times, I even thought it looked sort of like a gross, clay, Garten of Banban-type monstrosity, and longtime readers will know my opinions on that franchise.

The biggest problem Subliminal has, in my opinion, is a lack of direction. The game wants to go for an immersive feeling, and so it doesn’t feature any HUD elements or tracking devices. In some areas of the game, this can feel a little frustrating, as things slow to a standstill while you just sort of try to figure out what it is you’re supposed to be doing. It isn’t so much of a problem that it really got under my skin or stopped me from enjoying the game, but I could see how some other players, in certain areas, might just give up and play something else when faced with the directionless tasks and large, maze-like structures in Subliminal.

Overall, I actually enjoyed my time with Subliminal: the game looks gorgeous, thanks in no small part to the Unreal Engine; it has a pretty good story that tells itself to the player through the environment while leaving enough room for speculation; and its puzzles are incredibly clever without being too hard to solve. There are areas in the game where more guidance would have made the experience more enjoyable overall, and the inclusion of the game’s monster (s) feels a little disconnected from the rest of the experience.

However, the game is still rather fun to play and tells an interesting story, and for just $10, I think the minor issues are easy to ignore. Many elements of the game could change simply with the context of the second chapter, which has yet to release, so I’m looking forward to seeing what else Subliminal has in store.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Subliminal. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Subliminal is available on Steam.