TTRPG REVIEW: Liminal_ (Liminal Space)

I have the great fortune of having a partner who went through a very intense phase of buying and/or kickstarting every interesting TTRPG system he could get his hands on for a year or two pre-pandemic. This affords me a lot of opportunities to try out various systems and see where their strengths and weaknesses lie. In October 2023, we had a one-shot session of the strange horror-related game called Liminal Space with a group of six, which was quite interesting…

The game is set in a room as players wake up as themselves, with life having happened as it has IRL until you went to bed the previous night. You find yourself in a square room with four doors and the aim of the game is to get out of this place (aka find an exit) without panicking to death. There is only a Fatigue tracker and once you reach 100 Fatigue, you die. You can find helpful items in the rooms—essentially, there’s no rolling, but rather, if you think it’s reasonable to request an item from a room (say, a stapler from an office), you can surely get it, but you’re unlikely to realistically get a stapler from a swimming pool. It’s also worth mentioning that you should NOT be making an effort to fight your way out. You’re trying to escape from the strange phantasms that haunt you, not defeat them (trying to fight them will get you killed extremely quickly).

There are die rolls in the game (D8 and D100), which are for your successes and failures at handling the crazy things going on around you. Mechanically, the game is a bit confusing because every time a player moves, anyone else in the move can tag along with them. At first it seems simple as you get started: you can go to a different room or examine the room you’re in. Going to a new room will net you some Fatigue, while staying in rooms with entities will do the same. Rooms may only be rested in once, as well. However, once you have 6 people piggy-backing off each other through the rooms, it gets quite murky and convoluted, as it’s really hard to know what all needs to be checked and tested for the piggy-backers versus what the active PC is doing. It also creates jumbled spaces where you start to lose track of whose turn it is.

Overall, for a system, it was probably a bit under-developed in its mechanics (or at least a bit too confusing), but I will praise it for the addition of extra material from known horror artists like Junji Ito—extremely cool. However, where this game truly shone, was in its ability to test player compatibility and RP potential for groups, as well as flaws in logic that could be improved on before starting a bigger or more regular campaign. We found that four players were pretty good at playing nice, while one seemed to struggle slightly with the other players’ chaotic nature, and one seemed to think they were adhering to video game rules. This was all extremely valuable information for setting the scene for other games, so as a lot of the group chemistry came out and we were able to make it more clear how TTRPGs work and how consequences for actions come through. I can’t see myself playing this very regularly, but in instances where you want a horror-themed one-shot (we played it as a “Halloween game night” in October) or if you want to try out a new group together, I think this is a perfect setting to run a trial in!

I was the first to die, maybe halfway to three quarters of the way through the game, because I was never able to rest