Liminal Exit
Review
Sometimes change is bad
by Jordan Helsley
reviewed on PC
A Story For The Madness
The unnamed protagonist of Liminal Exit ("You," perhaps) arrives at a rundown building absolutely drenched in fog for an unknown reason. Inside the doorless lobby of the building is a pristine elevator with a television on a cart. The elevator leads only to the third floor and the television likes to talk to you through DOS-like text on the screen. Just another normal day. Breaking with most contemporary experiences, the goal here is not to work through a single space, but three, as you attempt to descend through the three floors to the parking level and, theoretically, escape, while bits and pieces of a story are doled out, usually by the omniscient television.
Unexpectedly, there is a story here. It's slight at face value, but as you get deeper into the experience a few threads reveal themselves, until an ultimate exposition dump explains everything there is to be explained. It doesn't come with a mind-blowing revelation or a groundbreaking narrative but it does leave lingering questions that are the actual highlight, if there is a highlight to be had. The best parts usually come from noticing small things in the environments or almost throwaway lines from the television, when it's not weakly talking trash or giving a not-so-subtle hint about the anomaly you just missed. None of this is going to make the story of Liminal Exit the draw, but a little expansion never really hurts, in a vacuum.
Playing Hide-and-Seek
To complete a full playthrough, you have to traverse each floor and accurately report whether there was an anomaly in the area at the exit elevator. It's not very unlike others, but it does opt to push the player forward, where many require anomalies to be reported by turning around. The constant forward progression works because it takes away the ability to "nope" and hightail it out of there, but it does somewhat limit the impediments the anomalies can pose because there always has to be a path forward. Sometimes that means a small puzzle will present itself, but they're never really a challenge, even as the floors get progressively more complex in what you should be paying attention to, because interacting with the space is extremely limited.
There's some extra repetition here, too, that Liminal Exit is not quite up to the challenge of overcoming. To pass from the third floor you must complete four walkthroughs. The second floor requires five, and the first requires six. The difference environments are nice, but one failed report sends you back to the beginning of floor three no matter where you area, so it won't be too long before even the somewhat obscure anomalies, which are pretty rare, devolve into a tedious game of just checking the same five or six things over and over again just to get to the second floor again. There is not a large enough pool of these anomalous events, especially on the third floor, to keep it interesting. Similarly, the game too often repeats anomalies you've just seen on the last attempt, even when unused ones remain in the tank. The game attempts to trade the joy of discovering all of the variations in the world for finding "the answers" to the mystery, but when the payoff for those mysteries doesn't hit it makes that trade off look bad.
An Uneasy Alliance
This genre has two distinct pillars that are total, or at least near, non-negotiables, and one of them is that you have to trust that it's playing fair. It's one thing when you can't trust the unseen force talking to you or scrawling messages on the wall, but it's another when you can't trust the game, and I had no less than two instances that cast some serious doubt on the latter. On one walkthrough of floor two I was greeted with a distinct hum in the background. For a game that's largely silent it's pretty noticeable. And because the game includes sounds in the list of potential anomalies, I marked an affirmative at the elevator and...reset. Liminal Exit does have issues with its sound design, footsteps often don't sound quite right, the boilerplate "walking in water" sound is a bit rough, as is the "recently stepped out of the water" walking sound, but they are all identifiable and explainable. This, on the other hand, appears to have been a glitch.
In another instance I failed to determine whether what I was seeing was a graphical glitch or a true variation, and I wrongly chose the former, but in fairness my gut was telling me it was the latter. The game has the standard "unreal engine" look to it with a general haze, anti-aliasing, or baked-in film grain, and while the assets and design looks good enough, visual artefacts are all over the place. It’s hard to spot subtle visual differences when the control isn't consistent. Combine those with the fact that I didn't fail a single report in my first full playthrough, but ended up with dozens before finishing the second, and failures that just felt wrong (pure speculation, that feeling is the point of these games, after all), it ended up completely tainting the hunting portion of the experience.
Escaping The Loop
Playing through Liminal Exit was occasionally frustrating, often visually interesting, and sometimes inventive. It helps that it's a short experience, whether you're good at finding the usually obvious differences or listening to your television friend’s hints, otherwise it might overstay its welcome. The story was intriguing enough to push me through, and the repetition in anomalies did make finding a new one more exciting, just when I thought I'd seen them all. It's also effectively creepy enough of the time, with some of the visuals alone giving me some nice, unconscious chills, and avoids crossing the line into cheap horror at the same time. While most of the ways it changes the formula of its simple genre don't pan out, it does relatively well at sticking to what works, even if it did make me a borderline conspiracy theorist about its trustworthiness.
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6.8
fun score
Pros
Effective design, some curious and completely unexplained mysteries that were a bit of fun, and enjoyable variation.
Cons
Sound design is a little incongruous, visual artefacts and glitches impact gameplay, harsh penalties make discovering late-level variations a chore, and a trade-off of discovery for story ends with neither being the focus.
