Liminal Exit review — Making the right call

Liminal spaces are such an eerie phenomenon; typically, some form of abandoned place that evokes nostalgia. They’ve really made a place for themselves in internet culture, and I can see why. Most people have childhood memories of going to the mall, or a public pool, or going to Blockbuster and peering into the manager's office, seeing that old carpet and yellowish wallpaper draped in white fluorescent lighting. Settings like The Back Rooms corrupt this nostalgia into something more ominous—an eternity of uncertainty. Liminal Exit, a psychological horror puzzle game by the small indie team LittleRedDread, has nailed the vibes of uncertainty and corrupted nostalgia that come with the liminal setting. 

Jumping into the plot, there really isn’t much of it. Players take the role of… some guy? I think? It sounded like a guy in the trailers on Steam, but we don’t hear our character speak in the game. We start on the top floor of a parking complex outside of a large, brutalist office building. Right away, something feels off. Almost everything is pale, from the bleached beige colored cement of the structure, to the smoky white smog that surrounds the area, to your empty white truck. Black street lamps jutting from the parking complex and dark window frames on the building stand out, with the whole monochrome color palette lending a dream-like feel to the situation. One of the few stand-outs on the whole exterior is a graffiti tag reading “Who is here?” Another eye-catching detail is the big red Cyrillic lettering of the sign on the roof that translates to “Flux Labs.” There’s also some sort of red light on the corner of the roof, mirroring that of our truck’s brake light. Peering into the distance, large cable towers loom ominously… Like they’re watching us. Let’s move to the interior.   

Heading into the building through doorless frames brings us to some odd mix between a vestibule and a lobby. The floor’s tiling has seemingly been scraped up, and the ceiling is cracked. There are a few chairs, a water cooler, and a closed wooden door. One elevator lies with its mouth agape, the two pieces of the door seemingly punched inward, lying criss-cross on each other. The elevator next to it opens. Stepping inside, there are a few notable objects, like an old computer monitor on a table, an elevator panel with four buttons, 1, 2, 3, and P, and finally, some sort of screen on the wall adjacent to the elevator panel. The doors close, and the monitor comes alive with green phosphor text telling us, “Welcome to the program. My name is S.A.M. The purpose of my being here is only to observe.” Then the screen on the wall comes to life. The info from the modern screen has instructive videos very clearly inspired by those of Aperture Labs from Portal. All we learn is that this place is, indeed, called “Flux Labs” and what we’re partaking in is simply called “The Program”. If we want to escape, then we have to proceed through various rooms and back down the floors. 

This is where the game really starts. You begin on the elevator, before moving through an area. While there, it’s your job to keep an eye out for anomalies. These could be as subtle as the clock ticking the wrong way, or as blatant as an eerie red glow emanating from the corner of a mostly white room. Once you get to the second elevator at the end of the area, you have to press one of two buttons, either the floor you're on if there was an anomaly, or P if there wasn’t. If you’re correct, then you move on to a copy of the same floor and do it again. A number will be on the wall in front of the elevator to let you know if you were correct and have progressed. The number counts down every time you correctly analyze if a loop has an anomaly, until you move on to a lower floor. If you were wrong in your analysis, then you restart the current floor entirely. The little monitor in the corner will make comments on your success or failure. It seems to have mixed personalities, some supportive, others verbally venomous. The nature of this genre is discombobulating, so don’t be surprised if it takes you a few loops to get the hang of it. 

This core gameplay loop is quite challenging, and it turns the player into their own worst enemy. Were those chairs red or blue before? What time was the clock set to? Was there an entire house beneath this shower before? No, most certainly not. The reset system adds a ton of tension as you progress, so obvious anomalies can feel like a godsend when you’re close to finishing a floor. There’s nothing more anxiety-pumping than being a single loop away from going to the next floor and wondering if you’re making the right call. Trying not to overanalyze is a tall order. This anxiety goes hextupple for those who enabled hardcore mode, which resets ALL of your progress, regardless of floor. One aspect that I can respect is that I never felt like I was tricked. If I missed something, it was usually a finer detail, but not one that’s still noticeable. 

One minor issue I had was that one time, I was reset because I missed that the drains in a shower room didn’t have holes. Next time, I checked the sink area, and the sinks also had no holes, which I assumed was an anomaly. It was not, and I got reset again. On one hand, tiny details like these matter, and it feels a little inconsistent to be reset; on the other hand, it was the monitor who told me I had missed the drains in the shower, an unreliable entity. Once it told me, “I don’t think that was the right one,” before, and I still progressed. This adds even more fear and confusion, which I would say fits the theme quite well. 

The visuals of Liminal Exit are solid, and the effects for a lot of the anomalies add an otherworldly feel. Then there are the more subtle elements of the visuals, like the minor headbob, or the camera focusing on what’s in your field of view. The audio is also quite good, and I like its subtlety. Sometimes the eeriest audio is the sound of your own footsteps walking down a long hallway. The loud stuff is saved for certain anomalies, which contrasts well against the usual quiet. Liminal spaces are about contrasts, after all. They’re familiar and comforting, yet foreign and isolating. 

My time with Liminal Exit was short and sweet. The worst bug I encountered was when the game crashed on me on the final floor, and I lost all progress. Even with the crash, it only took me an hour and a half to beat the game. While I won’t spoil the ending, I will say there are multiple, and I got the good one. The story isn’t super clean cut, but it does a good job of explaining what’s going on. It might even add to some personal theories about S.A.M. and what it really is. I do wish there were a little more story sprinkled in throughout the game, as it feels pretty backloaded, and the ideas it explores are interesting, so I would have loved it if they were expanded upon. Honestly, I’m really looking forward to what the developers at LittleRedDread put out next!