The Long Gate

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…

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 f…

Interfaces are obtuse, puzzles are extremely basic digital logic circuits.

Disclaimer: I've only completed the Digital area and the right half of the Analog area. Also I'm writing this when I'm really tired. This game has a beautiful aesthetic and fun ideas, but the puzzle design can be very obscure and/or cheesable. (Picking up and placing down a powered wire connector has weird effects; some puzzles can be solved while leaving entire sections unpowered.) Latch gates really need more introduction/explanation for beginners. There's also QoL issues such as: - Having to click twice to plug into stuff when clicking once should be enough for both the positioning and activating. - An inconvenient process for downloading bit strings to your tool. Perhaps this is to dissuade players from brute forcing inputs (or to contribute to immersion), but I really wish I could just pull up a UI to edit the bit string instead of having to go to the designated room. Also, 3D perspective makes it a little hard to distinguish rows. - Controls are sparsely explained. How was I supposed to know that attempting to go to my current floor would go up 1 floor, which is the only way to reach the top floor? (Speaking of the elevator, the value for floor 0 is 0001 when it co…

I hoped I would enjoy this game more than I did. While I admittedly only reached the first major area I think this 3D, almost FPS, way of presenting logic gate puzzles didn't clutch that well with the idea of a logic gate puzzle game. The puzzles themselves were enjoyable enough but I felt that the gameplay limited my enjoyment of the puzzles rather than added to them. I'll fully admit this may get better later on in the game but from how long I got into the game, it didn't seem worthwhile continuing for me.

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.