[Disclaimer: I received a review key for The Liminal Dimension through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
I previously played a game from Airem earlier in the year, Whispering Lane, which was a first-person exploration game with psychological-horror and survival-horror elements that was buggy in a way where you could end up soft-locked, and just too difficult in a way that wasn't fun enough for me to want to finish the game. In Whispering Lane, you had several environments and locations to explore while collecting items to use in puzzles while fighting off the occasional demonic horror. While not an entirely flawless execution, Liminal Dimension feels very much like a game developed by Airem (as if I could point them out of a line-up), in that there looks to be a bit more polish here where you explore a single location through a series of loops and visual distortions that amount to a satisfying game.
There was a bit of tinkering I needed to do on the Steam Deck in terms of controller settings, like mapping the Q and Left Control buttons to two of the back buttons, but apart from that, the game ran beautifully. And while I did notice the hallways tearing a couple of times along the floor and walls, I couldn't be 100% certain that this wasn't intentional, or more likely a result of the game engine handling potentially infinitely repeating hallways. It was something that I could easily overlook and did. I will link my unedited playthrough here, and I'll also include the whole video at the end of the article.
But now, on with the rest of the game. And of course, Spoiler Warnings from here on out.
The premise of Liminal Dimension is that you play the character of Harry who finds himself delirious in a hospital slipping into unconsciousness. When you "come to," you're in an elevator, supposedly in a hotel, which we only know about because of the pre-level narration telling us this. This was the second time, this early in the game that I kinda went "Ehhh, do we need that?"; the first was the computer-generated voice reading an epigraph. This secondary epigraph of sorts I feel is both redundant and not needed. Before we even start playing, we don't need to know that we're in an elevator as it's something that we'll find out in mere seconds. If we're waking up in an elevator, then how do we know that this elevator is located in a hotel and not a parking garage or the same hospital that we lost consciousness in? Then there's the reiterating the phrase from the ???? voice during the opening, that "Exit...It's the key...don't forget...exit." The only thing I can think of is that maybe during playtesting that that line was glossed over so players were missing this key game mechanic? Even mentioning that "Harry stared at the buttons on the panel, searching for the number 3" feels like it was inserted into the game because people couldn't find their way out of the elevator? This is of course just speculation but I don't think that this opening is needed
Once you leave the elevator, everything seems normal enough. You're in a dark green hallway that turns to the left, leading to a hallway of locked doors that dead ends after a right turn. Once you turn around, things start repeating themselves, and it's your goal to find a way out, however, out of what and out to where is an open-ended question. As you walk up and down identical and looping liminal hallways, you're supposed to follow the EXIT signs from what I can tell. Several EXIT signs only have the I halfway lit that I think you're supposed to ignore, but as I was attempting to finish the game and not do a full-on exploration of all of the game's possible mechanics, I would turn around to look for the fully lit EXIT sign. I am also not sure if interacting with the letters and cards you find scattered about are environmental triggers, but this would definitely seem to be the case since when you pick them up, they otherwise obscure the rest of the screen. So picking up cards and following the EXIT sign are essentially what you do for the whole game.
Me being me though, there were a few times when I read too far into the "Exit...It's the key" bit. In one instance, I noticed that the red EXIT was reflected in the glass on a painting on the wall, except that the back of the EXIT sign was facing the painting, so the EXIT should not have been visible in the reflection. I'm willing to bet that that was just something in the game engine messing up and that it was unintentional, but if it was intentional as a literal red herring, then major kudos to Airem for that, because I really enjoyed that effect both visually and feeling that maybe I was seeing something that I wasn't supposed to see or that Harry's brain was possibly playing tricks on him.
The letters, notes, and pictures are where the rest of the obtuse storytelling comes into play. When I first started, I had thought that Harry might have been in an event such as a car accident and was experiencing something akin to Limbo while doctors worked to resuscitate him. However, after reading as many of the notes as I could find I began to wonder if Harry wasn't actually an experiment at exploring a space where people go between life and death. A plane or existence of repeating environments where otherworldly creatures sometimes lurk. I thought of it as a mix between the hallway in P.T. and the film Flat Liners, except the organization running Project Lumen felt more well-funded than five medical students. As the game progressed, it felt more confident that Harry had been purposefully sent to this liminal dimension, although the specific reason I was not able to determine.
Thankfully though, Liminal Dimension does a lot more to mess with the player than I was expecting from a typical game about exploring liminal spaces that throw the occasional beach ball or lawn chair in the middle of your path; albeit those are still spine-tingling moments for me. Here we have visual effects accompanied by an audible stinger to let the player know that something that just happened was supposed to have happened. You might find yourself walking, turning the corner of a hallway for the 87th time, but the camera pulls hard to the left but you're still looking straight ahead. Or were you spun around and now you're looking behind you? Or you're walking down a hallway and suddenly the environment flips so that you're now walking on the ceiling. One of the more trippy effects was when, and I cannot confirm this until I extract that section from my gameplay video and run it through the Oculus Quest 2, but I think the game briefly projects in stereoscopic vision. And all of the in-game clocks that I came across displayed real-world time, which I just thought was a really cool touch.
Eventually, the game concludes with Harry finding his way back to the elevator although the omnipresent whispering voice wants Harry to question the validity of his reality. Is he really going back to the same reality he left? And will he be the same as when he left? Despite the hinting at a larger world beyond what we see in the game itself, hinted at in letters and the final scene, I feel like there doesn't need to be a follow-up to Liminal Dimension that explores this space in greater detail, say with a platoon of armed space marines. Please don't go this route, because as the game stands right now, it was a refreshing take on the exploration of liminal spaces with scripted events that were both entertaining and slightly unnerving.
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