The Long Gate Reviews

A hard puzzle game, which feels a great sense of accomplishment after solving those puzzles. Hope for more contents later.

I totally dig the atmosphere. The graphics design is very nice, reminds me faintly of Portal 2. With that kind of low fidelity geometry however, the game has no excuse for being so damn [i]LAGGY[/i]. The frame stutter alone makes it somewhat uncomfortable to play, but then the logic puzzles decide to snap elements to a grid by applying a dastardly unpredictable force to the first person camera. The result is a constant feeling of some moron jerking my mouse around. It gave me wrist cramps within half an hour. The puzzles themselves are plain old Boolean logic, and consequently did not have one interesting moment in the the three hours I spent in the game. Maybe it gets better later, but the premise did not seem promising.

A well made if rather hard puzzle game that's very heavily in computer science and engineering topics takes about 8-9 hours to finish

Surprisingly polished: awesome world design, fair puzzles, great difficulty progression. I enjoyed this. It gave my brain a good workout. Compared to other games, I'd say this is a bit expensive, but on a 50%-off sale it'd be well worth it. On to the bad side: though the puzzles are polished, there are a lot of technical annoyances: as soon as you start interacting with puzzles your mouse sensitivity drops massively. It feels awful. Some puzzles had me picking up my mouse to move back to the other side of the mouse pad several times just to drag something half-way across the screen. Also, performance is bad: In some areas even a 3090 TI will fall below 50 FPS when shadows are set to High. Switch to Medium and suddenly it's smooth 120+FPS. The game physics seems to have a different frame-rate. Sometimes the graphics were at 120FPS but half the things on screen were juddering as if it were sub-30FPS. Sometimes I would enter the right input for a puzzle and it wouldn't be recognized because something was invisibly slightly out of place. Also, if you know anything about electronics or quantum computing, you'll find it a lot easier as the puzzles mostly resemble textbook exercises from those fields. I still enjoyed the brain workout despite it not introducing any new concepts to me though.

Just finished the game. Excellent! I was blocking at one segment and by chance I realized that there was a specific thing to do before searching for help on the internet. Nice quantum level. I did not understand everything, and far from me to understand how a quantum computer works. I just made the inputs mostly by intuition, which was apparently sufficient. I wish i could have had this game when learning about boolean algebra, pass-by filters, binary conversion, RLC circuits or Q-bits at early years of university.

A logic game that covers a wide range of circuits and electronics topics. It's a good learning experience, and makes it really interesting to play with concepts that are normally kinda bland. I would recommend this if you really like logical puzzles, want to play with computing in an alternate way, or want to get more of an understanding how electronics work. I would probably not recommend this if you are looking for easy puzzles, or are looking for a story game. This game's about the puzzles, and expect them to take some effort.

TL;DR: Buy this game if you want to solve challenging and logical puzzles! You'll need some patience to learn what it wants to teach you, but it's worth it! Full review: The Long Gate is an enjoyable and minimalist puzzle game. It's a game where every time I walk into a new area I'm like "oh fuck off" because the problems seem too difficult at first glance. At the same time, I've yet to come across a puzzle that hasn't made sense, or that I couldn't solve, or that I didn't enjoy solving. I say this in the best way possible. There's a great satisfaction in solving the Long Gate's puzzles because the solutions often aren't immediately apparent, but they truly do make sense. When you work out the correct solution or sequence of actions, there's a strong sense of reward for the patience you showed while trying to make sense of the unfamiliar. I've not yet finished the game, but have really enjoyed it so far. It's been quite stress relieving and I find myself coming back to it quite easily. I did a year of programming back at the start of uni a few years back, so I was familiar with some of the concepts the game introduces early on. I've also dabbled with redstone projects in Minecraft and the puzzles you solve with circuitry in The Long Gate are sort of similar. If you don't want to learn binary, or bit flipping or how circuits work, then this isn't the game for you. If you can't accept that this game was made by a very small team and isn't perfect, then this game isn't for you. Otherwise, the puzzles definitely are challenging, but I do think that keen newcomers unafraid of a challenge could give this a go and enjoy themselves. I've found the game runs alright too on a gtx 1070 and ryzen 3600, though I do wish there was a cleaner AA implementation. The highest setting obscures texture detail in the distance, but turning this down introduces aliasing. With that said, it's still a good looking game with a clear atmosphere that is well supported by a low-key soundtrack. The sound effects are very mechanical too, which really adds to the cyber-industrial aesthetic of the game. I think this game is very underrated and definitely recommend giving it a go. I bought it at full price and am very happy with my purchase :).

This 2020 (!!) game suffers from a major design problem: Already on "level 2", you are being asked to solve complex puzzles that use the "LATCH" mechanism, with no introductory 'easy' variant that would explain what the hell it actually does. This is very common for single-designer puzzle games, where the author over-estimates what the players know or how they think. The reason why I'm mentioning the year when this game came out is that this is 13 years after PORTAL, which spends the first 5 or so levels without giving you the portal gun, then another bunch of levels before it gives you full control over both portals. This is because the developers actually tested the game with real humans and saw how much ordinary people struggle getting the basic concepts. So they toned it down more and more until testers were actually able to get through. In The Long Gate, you will unfortunately solve few puzzles (such as the Floor 2) by accident, with no real understanding WHY your 'clickety click click gosh darn it work click' approach worked. And the moment you do solve it, the game / designer incorrectly assumes that you KNOW why it worked, so you are expected to then use that knowledge in future puzzles, which get even harder. The game needs a massive rework of the early stages. Apparently, almost everybody goes to the Guide section and reads the solutions, which is probably not what the developer wanted. Edit after progressing further: Through sheer luck and perseverance, I managed to get roughly to the half-point of the game, until I reached a puzzle that is a HARD STOP. This puzzle contains a brand new component that is also a black box (i.e., you cannot look inside to see how it works, internally), it _may_ be on a timer, and it's controlled by 6 buttons. You need to use this device correctly 8 times, otherwise it resets to the beginning. Without solving this puzzle, it is impossible to proceed further. There is no "Reset to initial configuration" function in the game, and I managed to get the puzzle into a state from which the solution in the guides section does not work, so I guess I am out of luck. I've spoken about this game with people on the Discord who are apparently well-versed in engineering and circuits, but even they admit that frequently, they had no idea how the puzzles work. I remain convinced this game's design is deeply flawed.

I just want to say from the outset that I like the idea behind the game. I also have a degree in computer science - with a course or two on digital circuitry - so I was actually really looking forward to the analogue/quantum parts of the game. I really want to like this game, but even after just under an hour of play time I've decided to ask for a refund. Here's an incomplete list of all the problems I came across in that short amount of time: * Changing the graphics settings around I was able to crash the game * Moving the window to another display stops mouse input from working * After exiting to the main menu and loading back up puzzle progress was reset * For a game with a rather simple aesthetic its performance is quite lacking. I can't get above 70fps with the lowest possible settings using an rx580 & 3700x. * The UI layout is completely bizarre with "return" mixed in randomly with other things on the right (and of course esc doesn't work) * There's nothing to introduce the controls - and the first time I tried clicking again on the first door it didn't work only the e key worked * The introductory digital puzzle weirdly toggles the success door whenever you happen to get the right answer making it faster to just randomly toggle buttons than actually look at the circuit * The camera is constantly snapping around with absolutely no indication for when I can move again * Moving the gates around is really clunky: It changes your sensitivity, doesn't really work properly while walking and never easily connects up the way you want it to. * Somehow the difficulty settings was changed from under me - I initially set it to engineer, but changed it back to normal, then midway through I opened up the menu and it was back on engineer. * There's no indicator that you can switch the levels of the elevator - I first thought it just cycled through them and then had to wait for the crazy long animation to cycle 7 times before being able to look at the first puzzle again. * On level 2 the game requires you to program you "gun" with a matching code. There's no indication of how this should be done and the "hint" given on the easiest mode is to "look behind you" which is entirely unhelpful when whats behind you is a wall. * Additionally part of the puzzle on level 2 did not function until I completed an "earlier" part even though the two are entirely disconnected.

Technical jank and UI jank can be forgiven, but the real problem is that the puzzle design is awful. This game's idea of a puzzle is a binary addition calculator, already laid out for you. You do not need to, and cannot fiddle with the calculator in any way. All you need to do is generate the input, through a long and tedious process which is entirely identical across multiple puzzles. And you need to do this four times. That's not a puzzle for the player, it's a puzzle for the designer. For the player it's a homework assignment. There are some interesting ideas in there, to be sure. But it's squandered on tedious puzzle design where all the interesting stuff is already hardcoded.