I received a copy of Gateways on Steam from Indie Gamer Chick to be played for #IndieSelect. The game was given and received without expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and the experience be shared on social media to help spread the word about indie games. All pictures and words unless otherwise noted are my own from my own playthough.
Systems: XBLIG, Windows
Release Date: September 13, 2012
Publisher: Smudged Cat Games Ltd.
Developer: Smudged Cat Games Ltd.
Time Spent: 8 Hours 36 Minutes
Time Spent: 8 Hours 36 Minutes
If I wanted to quickly and inaccurately describe Gateways, it would be to say that it is essentially a 2D Portal. And while not entirely inaccurate, Gateways offers a lot more complex and mind-bending puzzles than what would be possible in Portal. Yes, there is a gun that creates portals for you to enter and exit while solving puzzles, but there is also a Resizing gun, a Rotation gun, a Time Travel gun, and a Multi-Gun that lets you combine elements from all four guns albeit with some caveats. Gateways is a wonderfully thought-out game with puzzles that both stumped and impressed me in their complexity, as well as infuriated me at my lack of being able to think my way into finding a solution without assistance.
Gateways was released by Smudged Cat Games back in 2012 as part of Xbox's Live Indie Games lineup. You play as the scientist Ed who finds himself in his laboratory unsure as to what just happened to him, who broke into his lab, and why his Gateway Gun has gone missing. The first 20% of the game does in fact play very similar to a 2D platforming Portal in that you are introduced to the world, there is jumping on platforms and around enemies to solve puzzles until you find the gateway gun. Like Portal, the Gateway Gun allows you to create portals on specific walls to access areas that you cannot walk or jump to. Passing through one portal leads you to the other portal, and vice-versa. There are a handful of puzzles to solve as each puzzle gives you greater access to the map, opening up new puzzles to solve while avoiding enemies and environmental hazards.
Before we go into a further in-depth description and analysis of all of the other types of guns you find in Gateways, because there are more, we need to do a little bit of housekeeping. Along with different types of guns, you can also find additional Health (allowing you to take an extra hit), an extension on the amount of time you have with the Time Travel Gateway Gun (more on that later), and the number of echoes you can have running around when you go back in time (more-more on that later). Scattered throughout the areas of the map are 500 glowing blue orbs that can be used to purchase solutions to puzzles. Each puzzle is a specific location and the way that the game implements this help/hint system is pretty ingenious.
Any time there is a puzzle to solve in the game to grant you deeper access to the level, there is a Help Kiosk that gives you the choice to purchase the option to see if this particular puzzle is currently solvable and if you then want to purchase the solution to this puzzle. Because there are several guns that have different functions throughout the game, some puzzles require you to backtrack to solve more complicated puzzles, and because this is the type of game that often requires the player to attempt a puzzle multiple times, trying different angles and different types of guns, it may not be obvious at first if you can solve a particular puzzle if you do not have both high-jump upgrades or if you do not have enough echos. In the late game, as I was going back to solve previously unsolved puzzles, on at least two occasions, I found out that even with nearly all of the guns and a bunch of upgrades, I still could not solve the puzzle, so rather than wasting any more of my time, I left and had a nice red mark on my map so I knew where to go back to when it automatically turned green when it became solvable. If the puzzle is solvable and you are still having trouble (no shame, as I used this feature quite a few times in the late game), you can buy the solution, at which point the game asks if you want it to take over, and you watch as the puzzle is solved for you in real-time, and once you clear the puzzle, the game relinquishes control. What is doubly great about this mechanic, is that if part of the puzzle is about getting through a difficult area, you can simply activate the Help Kiosk again (without having to pay any more Orbs) and the game will again take over control until it reaches the end of that puzzle.
The next gun gives you access to the Resizing Gateway Gun which allows you to either shrink down to (roughly) half your height, or nearly triple your size if you pass through the larger of the two portals; the Resizing Gun creates a large portal and a smaller portal, and the size you end up as depends on which portal you exit out of, but you cannot get infinitely small or infinitely large. Looking back, I can only think of one or two puzzles that required you to be larger than your default size, as the Resizing gun was primarily used to shrink you down to force you into small tunnels/hallways. It really felt like a portable version of Wayne Szalinski's Shrinking Machine and I would not be upset about an entire game that gave you greater freedom to manipulate your height in either direction. I just wanted more instances to use this gun to be bigger, but that is acknowledgedly more difficult to do in a map designed around platforming, spiked floors, and patrolling enemies.
The most confusing gun in the game and how best to implement it was the Time Travel Gateway Gun. I seem to recall that the game did a decent job of explaining the basic mechanics of the gun, in that you needed to use the time-shifting function to exit the room you had just entered, but the developing complexity of how best to use the gun, the game did not prepare me for. Let me see if I can explain how the Time Travel gun worked because again, it is still somewhat confusing. When you first use the gun to place a portal on the wall (we'll call Portal A), it activates an on-screen timer, showing you how long you have until Portal A closes on its own. Once you place the second portal (Portal B), Portal A closes and you have set the length of your time loop (that might be a bad way of describing it) if you do not enter Portal A before the timer for Portal B reaches the end, then it will close. When you enter Portal B, you exit through Portal A at the time that you set Portal A, and you now see your past self (echos) doing whatever it was you were doing before you set Portal B and went through it. If you happen to touch your echo in any way, both portals disappear along with your echoes and you continue where the collision occurred and have to reset your portals. These potential collisions can get very tricky later in the game when you often have to have multiple echoes activating and standing on pressure-sensitive buttons to open doors. This gets even trickier in the late game where the amount of space you can place portals is limited so the area around your entrance/exit becomes very hazardous.
The last type of gun you find is the Rotation Gateway Gun, which after playing the game for just over eight hours I find a little hard to explain without a visual diagram. Unlike the primary Gateway Gun, which reorients you upon exiting the exit portal regardless if it is on the wall, floor, or ceiling, the Rotation gun can rotate the world based on where the entrance and exit portals are placed. This is when the difficulty in the puzzles really ramped up. Knowing where to place your two portals to get the desired effect was oftentimes confusing for me, and only once after watching the game solve a puzzle for me did I figure out that the easiest way to flip the map 180 degrees was to place both portals on the same surface (in this case being the floor). There was one puzzle that required you to enter the same set of directional portals multiple times to solve the puzzle, something that had not happened before and I was not mentally prepared for that kind of solution.
The final gun you find is the Multi Gateway Gun, which combines all of the previous guns so that you can use more than one type of gateway at a time. Previously, you could only have one type of gateway activated at a time, so if you want to activate the Rotation Gateway, you have to close the Resizing Gateways you have open and when you close whichever gateways you have open, you revert to normal (your size goes back to your default size, and any rotation from the Rotation gun reverts to normal gravity). Before the multi Gateway Gun, solving puzzles was a little more straightforward in that once you figured out which gun you needed, then it was a lot of trial and error to solve the puzzle. With the Multi gun, I was a little afraid that knowing which combination of guns was going to be confusing, and the mechanics around the Time Travel gun only compounded that fear. Because when using the Time Travel function in tandem with the other functions, those functions have to be used first before using Time Travel, because once you place a Time Travel gateway, you cannot place any other gateways. This is definitely one of those times when learning all of this was a lot easier by doing rather than trying to figure out what I am talking about by reading.
The rest of the primary puzzles that lead you to the end of the game required you to use multiple gateways to find the solution and this was when I used up the majority of my orbs to have the game solve the puzzles for me. I fully admit that I used 415 orbs through some combination of determining if puzzles were solvable and having the puzzles solved for me. No shame, because the mechanic was there in the game to be used if need be, and for a handful of puzzles, I really needed help. Another thing I liked about having paid for puzzles to be solved, aside from the frustration of trying to figure out what to do after spending at least 10 minutes banging my head against the wall, was that there were a few puzzles that required solving just to move to the next room. So when you went to the Help kiosk, you could activate the kiosk again (without paying again) and the game would take over control and solve the puzzle for you again. Again, no shame in this, because that is what the orbs were for and an optional accessibility feature is a welcome feature.
An optional equipment pickup that I only found because I was doing some exploring after getting stuck on a puzzle, was the Time Suit. The Time Suit allows you to be in the same space as one of your echos so you do not run the risk of resetting time by accidentally running into your echo. Thinking about the final puzzle in the game, I do not know how more difficult that would make the puzzle, but I know that not having to think about that was a huge relief. The other Time Travel Gateway Gun-related items you pick up in certain rooms upon solving puzzles, the extra echos and extra time were also welcome finds when I felt I could not solve puzzles. I believe you need at least four echos out of the possible eight that you find, but that is only on the normal difficulty.
Yes, there are apparently two difficulties and I only realized that while trying to figure out the final puzzle in the game. The thing with this last puzzle, is that there is no Help kiosk to solve the puzzle for you, which was a little worrisome, but I was able to solve the pentultimate puzzle so I thought that this last one was not going to be as troublesome as say, "Dancing on the Ceiling" or "Splitting the Laser." After figuring out the different parts to the puzzle, where I thought I needed to have the Resizing gateway, the standard gateway, the Rotational gateway, and the Time Travel gateway, I realized that I was still not any close to figuring out the solution after 20 minutes of trial and mostly error. I ended up browsing the Discussions section in Steam and managed to find a walkthrough. The only problem was that this final room had two lasers that I had to redirect whereas the room I was looking at only had the one. This was getting out of hand.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Out Of My Brain, On The Train
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