Gateways Reviews

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this game to anyone because I can't play it. The title screen opens, tells me to press start, which I can't do because the cursor is frozen, and that's it. It seems odd that no one else has ever had this issue. There seem to be one or two discussion threads with similar issues and no response from Steam, the developers, or anyone else.

Gateways is an interesting little game. The comparisons to Portal are bound to occur, so let’s just come right out and say what everyone is thinking: “This is a low-budget, 2D portal clone”. It’s almost true. You can only make portals on certain walls, you can only have two portals at any given time, and at no point do you get any actual weapons to fight the few but deadly hostile lab things. That’s pretty much where the comparisons end though. I’m going to roll out this review in a bit of an unconventional way, addressing the general gameplay first and then each progressive gateway gun which expands the gameplay as you progress through the story. The overall presentation is a pixelated cartoony affair, almost pretending to be a Super Nintendo game but with substantially better lighting effects. With a Metriod-style map that is uncovered as you go and tracks which puzzles you can or cannot do at any given point (provided you spent 5 orbs for a ‘puzzle hint’ while there), exploration is encouraged particularly as you discover upgrades to your health and gateway gun abilities over the course of the game. The game unfolds with the doctor waking up in his lab, with no memory of why things seem to be going awry. After some simple exploration, explaining how to defeat enemies by jumping on their heads, broken glass on the floor hurts you, and learning the merits of pushing a button to open a door, you get the first and arguably most important “Gateway gun”. The first gun is what you expect from being described as a 2D portal clone. Using your mouse to aim and fire, you have total freedom for any angle you want to shoot from, provided the surface you’re aiming at is valid for a gateway. Now that you’re able to traverse the map in a meaningful way, puzzle checkpoints become a regular sight, and the seemingly random “orb” collectibles can be spent for hints or full-on solutions. Much of the map is accessible early on, but many puzzles are impossible without the necessary gateway gun to get past it. Unlike Metroid or Castlevania, Gateways has the courtesy of literally placing a bright red arrow on the next map area you’re supposed to go in order to proceed, be this an upgrade you have yet to grab or a puzzle you can now finish with your recent acquisition. The next gateway gun is the resizing gun, which allows you to grow one size up or shrink one size down, depending on which portal you enter. Unfortunately, there are very few instances where growing large will do any good while there are quite a few small areas, so it feels merely like a means of drawing out the map with areas that could have just as easily been kept behind a locked door. Along the way you’ll be granted a flashlight and a mirror, serving as an extra bit of puzzle mechanics involving light-sensitive switches and laser sensors. Unlike the gateway gun, the mirror angles are not free axis and it feels a bit out of place, especially as the flashlight and mirror are bound to different keys and are toggled on and off. The throw of the light from the flashlight also isn’t very great, and there seems to be absolutely no use for it in later gameplay. The difficulty curve takes a sudden jump with the introduction of the Time Travel gateway, and I blame this on the lack of substantial tutorials on its use. After creating the first gateway, your actions are recorded. Placing the second gateway and leaping through it will cause you to leap out of where you set the first gateway, but there will now be an “echo” of your former self, doing what you did the first time around. As you progress through the game, you’ll find power-ups to both extend your time meter as well as increase the number of echoes you can generate by leaping through the time portal multiple times. It’s clear that this mechanic of effectively making copies of yourself was central to the game, but the clumsy introduction did not win me over. The most frustrating mechanic of the time machine gateway gun is that touching your echoes causes a “paradox”, which just means all of your echoes disappear and you’re left standing wherever you screwed up. This irritating mechanic is actually negated by a power-up known as “the time suit” which allows you to walk right through your echoes, but this is in a completely optional area and you can literally finish the game without ever picking it up. Getting it, however, will make a number of puzzles much easier. The final gateway gun could have been a very fun mechanic, but its implementation nearly made me rage-quit the damn game. The rotation gateway gun effectively shifts the gravity of the lab (your map too) to any of the 90-degree angles. Unfortunately, you can only rotate 90 degrees at a time, and since most of the puzzles seem to be walking on the ceiling, this means clumsily trying to situate your portals so you flip twice in the same direction and don’t accidentally flip three times or flip back to the ground. Throughout this experience, you’ve been able to “cancel” your existing portals by changing guns, as you cannot have more than two portals at any given time. This works great with both the size gun and the rotation gun, as you can snap back to default with a simple gun swap. THEN THEY FUCK THAT UP. In the last area, there is a sharp difficulty spike as you collect the “multi-gun”. As the name might imply, you’re now able to use more than one portal type at a time. This means you can technically have seven portals down (two standard, two size, two rotate, one time), making puzzles a downright nightmare. And you can no longer cancel your portals by swapping guns. Again, the time loop thing isn’t bad. It’s been done before, arguably better due to the clumsy meter implemented in this game, but once you combine the time loop with the size gun and the rotation gun... it’s really quite the cluster fuck. There are 500 orbs to collect in the game. I did not collect every last one of them, but I did end up spending most of them as I chose to buy the solution to most of the final puzzles outright. Rotation, clumsy as it is, becomes absolutely infuriating as you can now stumble through any number of other portals which may send you straight into a pit of glass. Add in the timed limitations of time travel and trying to arrange a small pack of your doctors across half a dozen switches, and you’ve got an angst-filled brain tumor building in the back of your head. I did beat the game, but not without the help of a YouTube video showing how to beat the final puzzle. You can’t buy the solution to the final puzzle, which is fair, but I cheated my way out of it with the video walkthrough. The ending, as you might expect for the low-key presentation, is not exhilarating, even though the steam achievements may lead you to believe there’s some great truth to be revealed. With a still picture and caption text explaining what happened to the doctor, you’re presented with a happy end and a brief roll of the credits. Oddly, like a handful of old console games, the “The End” screen does not allow you to skip past it in any way by clicking or action buttons, so I simply closed the game window at that point. Wrap up: It’s a fun title, initially, with some good ideas and sometimes mediocre execution. The art style and music keep the atmosphere light, even though the difficulty spike at the end might demand more of a lab hell setting. Final Score: Frustrating gimmicks in the late game make this a difficult puzzle fan-only recommendation.

Easily dismissed as a 2D-Portal copycat [spoiler](funfact: it sorta is, but bear with me)[/spoiler], and though lacking in many aspects, it might still be sort of a fun game. Yes, it has the same mechanics as Portal, and yes, it is 2D, but it is not only that. You have the space-wraping portal, but also the - rotation portal which changes the direction of the gravity - shrinking/growing portal - time-wrapping portal The combination these different portals give raise to a myriad of possibilities for endless headache. Whenever you face a new puzzle, however, you might still be unable to solve it: you might need to revisit that puzzle in the future. For this reason, the game gives you the choice of spending some "power orbs" in order to reveal if you can solve a specific puzzle or not. Which then brings the cons of the game. The map is huge and let me tell you, not fun to navigate at all. Curisouly enough, the game is rather short: I have the feeling that if the puzzles would be presented linearly in their solveable sequence, this game would have been [i]even shorter.[/i] Also I felt like there could be more puzzles combining the portals, and the ending felt "lazy". Also, this game [i]screams[/i] for a little bit of a story in a comic/sarcastic tone, but there is *nothing*, be warned. The puzzles are solid, enjoyable and not overly frustrating but also nothing ingenious. Achievements are fine, except for "That's the way to do it" which cannot be obtained in Linux. If you don't support the achievement in a [i]supported platform[/i], please, remove the achievement, that didn't even need to be said. Otherwise the game gave me no headache in Linux. So as a puzzle game, this is a good (short) game. It could have been more, but that's all that it is. It might be enough.

During the first hour I felt there wasn't much to this game. I almost put it down and cut my losses. However, I kept playing knowing that the game was progressing quickly. To my surprise some of the latter puzzles were VERY CHALLENGING. A few of them were quite mind bending. This game certainly made my head hurt. I'm glad I'd stuck with it.

it is pretty interesting for some brain-teasing...although towards the end it kinda gets unreasonable hard IMHO. pretty cool game, but nothing special. better than a lot of other crap out there i'm sure, but not spectacular. one thing i can say is that i never, not even once found a bug/performance problem with this game, unlike most of the other games i've played on steam, but considering the system requirements that's not an epic compliment. you can also fully edit the controls, something that isn't completely typical of all steam games, and i appreciated that.

A brilliant little metroidvania puzzler in the vein of portal. The story is mediocre, but this is a gem of gameplay.

This game has a number of good concepts in it and I want to like it, but when the time-travel portals are tossed in it just becomes too obtuse and finicky. When I reveal the solutions for the more complicated puzzles with that mechanic, my response is less "I should have thought of that" and more "I would never be able to pull that off". Precisely coordinating five or more instances of yourself in a limited time-span on top of the general disorientation from the other powers is just too much.

Short but enjoyable puzzle game, with some elements of timing and platform style precision required. I am not a champion platform gamer. The game was more of a know your tools and how to use them style. The better you are with the gadgets, the easier it is for the platforming. In some cases, the many gadgets give more than one way to solve a puzzle. The graphics are like that of classic Mario, but the controls and depth of game play is more advanced than even some major AAA game releases. It was rather short, but very enjoyable. I did end up using a guide to find a couple of things here and there, but never needed a guide for the puzzles, and never once needed a hint. The game is logical and well designed and was fun to figure out. I recommend this for those that like puzzle solving and thinking games. Do not judge this one by the graphics not being the latest high definition, or you will be missing out on a fun experience.

Gateways has a decent concept, sort of in the vein of those Portalesque games that followed in it's wake, but a reasonably decent game. Although, unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish the game. The puzzle design has some of the most difficult puzzles in the game being mandatory to complete, which wouldn't be a problem normally. But, the mechanic you unlock near the end of the game that enables these puzzles involves a lot of key timing and platforming that ended up being far too twitchy for me to finish. Ultimately, because I have no 'maybe' option, I have to vote No on Gateways because of this. Perhaps if they had structured the game a little differently I could recommend it. But sadly, if any of what I mentioned seems like a red flag for you, I'd look elsewhere.

This game really does surprise you. It comes off as "portal, but in 2D, and minus the sense of humor." And well, it kind of is, but it does so much more. The puzzles get progressively harder and more complex as you get different guns, and the last sequence of puzzles before the end is kind of just completely brain-melting. There's a surprisingly high execution factor in some cases, as well. And this is only the normal difficulty. I've not played the game's "hard" mode but I doubt I'd be able to complete it if I did. The graphics are kind of ugly though, all things considered, but that's a minor knock against it.