The Long Gate Review
Publisher: Inductance LLC
Developer: David Charles Shaw
Platform: Windows Steam, Switch (reviewed)
Release Date: July 29th, 2021
Price: $14.99
The Long Gate is a game that doesn’t fit well into any category. Essentially, it’s a science fiction version of escape room designed by an electrical engineer.
The game begins in a tunnel, seemingly deep underground. How, and why, you are there is a mystery. With nothing else to do, you head on down and end up spat out in front of a giant entryway. Enormous doors opening onto a vast vegetation filled cavern, incongruously lush and green.
You’ll want to take a moment to look around, made all the more impressive for being the work of a single person. Resembling nothing so much as the back room of the museum of science, some chambers are well lit, while others are sunk in a dim gloom.
Snarky remarks aside, this game is just beautiful.
The music is appropriate, gentle ambient electronica with environmental sounds ranging from rushing water to shorting circuits. Everything you need to know is either written on the floors and walls or conveyed through symbols projected wherever they’re needed.
As for the story. I pretty much covered it already, you start in a tunnel and head down. There are a few hints here and there of a story, but the game is most definitely focused on the journey and not the destination.
Overall play is pretty straightforward. Standard issue first person WASD movement. Use your mouse to look around– WASD to move, mouse to look, and space to jump. Puzzles start out by plugging A into B to get past doors, but it gets progressively more difficult. I won't give anything away, but this may not be for you if your idea of solving puzzles is Angry Birds. But if you think Stephen Hawking is a spanking good read, this might be the game of the year for you. Having said that, the game struggles to balance gameplay with difficulty. On one hand, there are clues, and early on you're just presented with something like a Portal gun and left to figure things out. On the other hand, you quickly run into concepts like logic gates that thankfully have explanations as to how they work. The game itself is divided into three main areas, analogue, digital, and quantum circuits, respectively. The first two can be played in any order, and you can move back and forth if you want, but the quantum zone only opens up once you've completed analog and digital.
If you hate yourself, but you aren’t quite ready to fling yourself in front of a bus yet, you can try “engineer mode” which removes many of the clues. This leaves a truly alien world that is not at all comprehensible to liberal arts majors. You can also increase the hint level to receive more detailed explanations of the technology, but this doesn’t help with the puzzles which is what I needed because I took history rather than physics.
Liberal Arts majors, should keep moving.
Bottom line, I’m impressed not without reservations, The Long Gate is a great and in many ways unique puzzler, but it still has a way to go. Fortunately, the developer, and yes, it apparently just one guy, is reportedly adding new content, so I’m hoping that when I revisit this game, they will have found a story worthy of the setting.
The Good:
Great Art
Great World-Building
Fiendish Puzzles
The Bad:
No appreciable story
A bit too non-linear
Fiendish Puzzles