At first glance, Gateways appears to be a relatively simplistic puzzle-platformer with an easy-on-the-eye 8-bit style. This is an illusion quickly shattered by the highly intelligent puzzle design and rock solid mechanics.
Revolving around the use of various Portal-esque gateway-guns, Gateways features a surprising amount of puzzle variety. From gateway guns that simply relocate you, or shrink you, to guns that manipulate time and gravity.
Gateways breaks free of the very obvious comparisons with Portal at an early stage and never looks back.
It’s quite common to see games that have brilliant mechanics, superb ideas, but fail to fully capitalize on them; afraid, perhaps, of complexity and challenge. Gateways has no such fears, and the difficulty of the puzzles quickly escalates. By the end of the game, the puzzles require the use of the full spectrum of gateway guns.
The difficulty of the puzzles is both Gateways best feature, and the only part deserving of serious criticism. Highlighted in particular by the final puzzle, the difficulty of the puzzles is often exacerbated by the timed portal gun mechanics, which leave such a small margin for error that they lead to needless frustration. This problem could be fixed by taking a leaf out of, for instance, Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time’s book. A simple time rewind would allow the erasing of mistakes that would otherwise lead to a complete repeat of the puzzle. For most puzzles, repetition is not an issue as executing the solutions is fairly simple, however, towards the end of the game it can take several minutes per attempt and only a few tries can lead to a lot of wasted time.
Comparisons with Portal are a given for any puzzle game that utilizes the concept of portals. It must then be said that one of Portal’s greatest features is that it encourages experimentation by making the reset time after a failure quite short. The final few puzzles of Gateways, unfortunately, do not share this encouragement of experimentation as failure is punished by long reset times. One useful analogy is to think of a mountain. On one side is a sheer cliff and the other is a slope with several plateaus. In Portal the player is walking up the slope, and when they fall, they end returning to the next plateau down. In Gateways, that same slip would result in restarting the entire endeavor. Adding a rewind mechanic to the timed gateway gun, would be the equivalent of cutting ledges into the side of the cliff so you don’t fall too far.
An easier mode was added, that simplified the final puzzles a little bit. This does remove a lot of the frustration and allows players, who are stuck, to progress, however a player who chooses the harder difficulty (the difficulties can be swapped at will by returning to the main screen) will still face frustration. An addition to the mechanics would provide a solution to the frustration aspect without sacrificing puzzle complexity. Despite this criticism, the easier mode is certainly a welcome addition for the players who are perhaps less savvy when it comes to puzzle games.
Laid out on a Metroidvania-style map, Gateways puts you in the shoes of an inventor named Ed. This friendly, eccentric genius arrives at his laboratory one day to find that some inconsiderate hooligan has been up to shenanigans and the lab is a mess; test subjects are running amok, holes have been knocked in the walls, obstacles have been placed and Ed’s prized gateway-guns have been pilfered. Taking a minimalistic approach in its use of story, Gateways merely uses it to provide both a context to the adventure and a final goal, with the story being barely present beyond that. This is actually not an issue and the lack of an over-bearing story is a nice counterpoint to the current industry trends. Gateways is a bastion of gameplay and difficult puzzles, and it is fully aware of this fact.
Gateways is a game that harkens back to a different era; an era when simple concepts were developed into complex systems. It has a sense of focus not often found in more ‘modern’ games and this; combined with the 8-bit style, excellent sound track and superb mechanics, make it a game well worth the time investment.
Declan Skews
@DSkews
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