Superliminal and a Borromini Gallery in Rome
What if everything were always— and only— a matter of perspective? #architecture #illusion #videogame
Welcome back to Artcade, where the world turns upside-down and every little thing becomes huge while every huge thing shrinks. Sometimes it almost seems as if video games are more than just a hobby—sharing languages and themes with the noblest art forms. Impossible, right? And yet… Today we summon the Borromini—a sculptor so legendary it comes with its own definite article. Maybe he can set things straight (or maybe not). Enjoy the read!
Don’t be fooled by the picture above: walking the gallery full length takes no more steps than you need to get from the bathroom to the kitchen (if you live in a castle, the metaphor doesn’t apply).
The Borromini designed and built it by intentionally distorting the proportions so that a corridor barely 8.6 meters long looks like a grand gallery about 35 meters deep. The lines converge and your brain insists on reading them the usual way. The section and plan below make the trick clearer.
By gradually shrinking every element, raising the floor, lowering the ceiling, and squeezing the walls, the Borromini created an accelerated forced perspective that deceives us. Even the statue at the far end is actually tiny. Shift your viewpoint just a little to the side (photo below) and you start to sense the real scale—though the optical illusion refuses to die. Our brains are stubborn interpreters.
Francesco Borromini (1652-1653) Perspective Gallery [Architecture] Palazzo Spada, Rome
As the calendar in the photo says: “Perception IS Reality.” In Superliminal, playing with perception is the key to escaping a scientific experiment gone wrong.
You know the drill by now: video game plots love scientific experiments (we learned that three weeks ago with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Another World). In Superliminal the protagonist wakes up trapped inside what was supposed to be a study on sleep (and dreams). Which means what you see is often not what it seems:
Optical tricks aren’t the only oddities in Superliminal’s strange world. Objects can be enlarged or shrunk simply by picking them up and using your line of sight. Grab a tiny item, move it closer, and it doesn’t just look bigger—it actually becomes bigger. As you can see, it works on bananas, too.
While you test every strange possibility, scientists send you odd messages over radios, speakers, and whiteboards, trying to coax you out of the dream. With limited success. Maybe because, honestly, it’s not such a bad place to be.
Pillow Castle Games (2022) [2019] Superliminal [Video game] [Puzzle] [2½ Hours.] (Xbox Series X) [MacOS, Windows, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4/5, Xbox One/Series S] Pillow Castle Games
Information Desk:
Superliminal’s multiplayer mode never caught on, but it was stuffed with wild ideas—see them in this video. The name alone is worth the click: Superliminal Group Therapy. How great is that?
Curious about the accelerated forced perspective technique used for Palazzo Spada’s gallery? A (Italian-language) article on the CICAP site digs deeper.
If you prefer deep dives in YouTube form—hey, no judgment—check out this excellent video, The most unique game I’ve ever played. At one point it compares Superliminal to the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. If that isn’t peak Artcade content…
My last two coins
I’ll spare you the cheap joke about size versus perspective. I’m more interested in the sense of wonder Superliminal sparks. The game makes real something kids do instinctively—until experience and habit force us to forget. By now we’re wired: big things that look small must be far away; small things that look big must be near. Breaking that baked-in rule turns every room of the game into a marvel. I wish more games did this—upending the “truths”we take for granted: lines mean waiting, people don’t bounce like balls, losing someone must equal sorrow. Maybe those games exist and I just don’t know them. If so, let me know. Until the next episode, ciao!