The Long Gate

The Long Gate is a first person puzzle game. You, uh, solve puzzles. There’s no story here, at least that I could figure out anyways. You’re just in this weird alien place, there are a number of different types of puzzles in this, but they all require you to get energy from the in to the out in such a way that it solves the requirements.

The starter puzzles explain how to turn on and off switches, the first requires a switch flipped, the next one was one or the other flipped, and the last one was one and one needed to be flipped. It was basically teaching you python a programming language, eventually it adds stuff to that like ‘not’ which changes what goes into it, if something with no energy goes into the not then it gets energy, if something with energy goes into it no energy comes out of it. That’s just one type, and it just gets larger and larger making it harder as it goes. Another one uses latches and circuits to get pathways to go to specific areas and those just get bigger, and honestly those are hard to figure out anyways. And another type I found was one that used graph waves, where you would manipulate them via different boxes that manipulated it different ways to get the wave to match what the box says it wants. There’s all sorts and they all get real hard, real fast.

I liked the first type the most but near, what I assume was anyways, the end of it just got too big and I couldn’t follow it. The latch one was good until it got to something where it was trying to have you program something, but it doesn’t tell you what needs to be done. Since I have no idea what the game wants me to do to actually solve it, I can’t, it doesn’t tell you what you need to do or what’s right or wrong so I’m stuck in that section. The waves puzzles are hard for me because I honestly just have trouble figuring out how each thing is going to change the end result. As such, I have to just fiddle around until I get it right cause I’m a dunce.

You can jump and crouch granted I haven’t seen a reason to actually do either of them. The very opening area you fall in a whole and it leads to various different levels of the map, each one has different types of puzzles, those are the three I managed to get deep into before my brain broke and I gave up cause I’m not particularly bright. It’s a very pretty game, different areas have different designs and colors. Many places are still darker colors but the designs are changed to fit the different ways of solving puzzles. It’s like a giant computer or something you’re turning on or some shit, which is why there’s not a lot of brightness, however there’s some areas that are lush with water and plants which are very pretty.

The Long Gate was developed by David Shaw.

Point of Sale: Steam.

$20

A review copy of the game was provided by the dev.

darkmikasonfire awards The Long Gate the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval.