A Picture’s Worth of Potential
From indie developer Indest comes the tale of a reluctant hero told through the discovery of hidden words. Subliminal Words marries the challenges of I Spy and word scrambles to create a novel puzzle gaming experience. While the game’s premise intrigued me enough to start my journey, its increasingly apparent red flags made it hard to commit.
Eye of the Beholder
Subliminal Words begins simply by introducing players to its easiest puzzles, allowing them to get a feel for the challenges ahead. Suddenly, Sigmund Freud appears and prompts players to pore over images and type what they see. You’ll select letters by tapping on each in order to spell out the word buried in each image. After a successful guess, the word will be illuminated, and a sentence will scroll at the top right corner of the page, revealing the game’s overarching story.
Our iconic psychologist disappears after the first few rounds, and players will largely go it alone (he’ll occasionally pop up later). However, I never really missed Freud, largely because he never offered much beyond encouragement. In retrospect, his sudden disappearance and underwhelming absence should’ve been the first red flag.
Get a Clue
Initially, I fell for Subliminal Words’ mishmash of interesting ideas, though I wasn’t totally sold on its story. Sure, the gradually unfolding narrative was interesting enough, but its arcs were never truly compelling. This “reward” for puzzle-solving soon felt empty, especially as the difficulty of uncovering words ramped up. To make matters worse, Subliminal Words hides the entire sentence surrounding the missing word. This means that you can’t rely on context clues to suss out the unseen word. Instead, you’ll need to watch ads to utilize the game’s clunky hint system.
Subliminal Words’ hints can be helpful in the right situation, but they are truly frustrating during tougher puzzles. Players can either remove three letters, gain the ability to manipulate the image or illuminate a letter in the image. Removing extra letters often provided very little aid in harder situations. Additionally, illuminating individual letters also proved bothersome because, most of the time, the letters were ones I already knew or otherwise provided no inspiration. However, the image manipulation hint won me more puzzles than the others. This tool allows players to rotate and zoom in and out of an image. Zooming out proved extremely useful, as the change in perspective brought the word more into focus.
Everywhere an Opportunity
As you can imagine, watching back-to-back 30-second plus ads during tougher puzzles felt awful. Not only was this a huge time-waster, but by the time I’d gotten back to solving, I’d lost my train of thought. This frustration was only exacerbated thanks to the game’s increasingly sneakily camouflaged words. Images often became so distorted that they no longer resembled their initial inspiration and felt more liminal than anything else. If the game had leaned more into this idea of liminal spaces, it might’ve made things more interesting. However, these heavily distorted images felt more like they were solely in the service of tougher puzzles.
Subliminal Words’ biggest problem is that it never fully realizes the myriad of interesting ideas and gameplay mechanics involved. Why is there an overarching story being told that never really relates to the themes or gameplay involved? What’s with Freud making occasional appearances? Why are puzzles that are so stinking difficult to solve suddenly followed by the easiest puzzle ever created? I never fully came to understand these glaring design distortions, but what I saw buried amongst the confusion is a game that deserves fine-tuning.
