REVIEW: The Long Gate
Dear Mr. Shaw,
I surrender.
After playing through as many levels as I possibly could through your game, “The Long Gate,” I have come to the conclusion that it has beaten me. This has little to do with your game and much to do with me and the way that I think.
Let me explain…
When I was dropped into the game (on Switch) and had only the controls to keep me company, I walked forward until finding this beautiful clearing, a gigantic door, and some kind of tool that would presumably help me moving forward. From this point, the game was on. Fumbling about, I ended up in another chamber, pushed a button, something happened, and then I fell into a pit.
Game over?
Not hardly.
Instead, I was given a puzzle. This puzzle was based on logic circuits. I thought to myself, “Great, I love this kind of stuff!”
The first few were great fun, I felt intelligent, accomplished even. Then it all came crashing down. It only took a few levels before I had to have more than a passing understanding of binary, and from that point, I was a chipmunk at a keyboard. Any progress made from that point was caused by luck rather than either skill or knowledge, and the game was over for me.
This game is amazingly put together. There is no motivation to play (no princess to save, no world ending cataclysm to avert) except for the puzzles themselves. Broken into three different styles (digital, analog, and quantum) the puzzles (at least the ones that I encountered) are well designed so that one can see the logic behind them. The visuals for the Switch port are a little fuzzy, giving the impression of a previous gen game. This is most obvious when one needs to read what a component is. The controls…could use some work. While playing, it was quite obvious that this was a game designed with a keyboard and mouse in mind.
A puzzler to the core, this game delights in being challenging, but not mean. It seems to assume a working knowledge of computer science, engineering, and binary. It doesn’t explain much of anything to you, and the easiest difficulty, the one that gives me hints, didn’t go quite far enough. At different times, I solved a bit of puzzle and had no earthly clue how it happened. If this happens to you, take my advice and walk the whole puzzle again until you do understand, because it is going to come up again. Each level is a tutorial for the next, or it’s an opportunity to vie for promotion. For me, I reached my level of incompetence at about the 4th level of each of the digital and analog areas. Given some time and space, I could probably figure some of them out, but my level of frustration outstripped my level of engagement.
If I could make one change to the game, it would be to have a balcony somewhere on each level so that one could get an overall view of the board. Trying to wire a circuit board in first person was terribly frustrating.
Is the game good? It’s hard for me to say. The controls at times have some hiccups, and the graphics are fuzzy. This is distracting but not breaking. The puzzles are challenging and build on one another, and are inventive enough to require a development of one’s logical processes. The expectation that a player will already know how these different circuits are supposed to work at the beginning of the game mean that the learning curve is steep from the very beginning.Â
If you are mathematically and engineering minded, this game is likely a welcome puzzler. If not…well…it’s probably best to skip it.
I give it a solid B for challenging (and fair) puzzles that I am unprepared to logic through.Â
I surrender.
~ Chad
