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 ♥♥♥♥ 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 ♥♥♥♥.
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.
