The Gateway Trilogy

Let me be abundantly clear: Gateway and Gateway 2 are worth the $10 by themselves, to ME. I have an extremely strong nostalgia for them, so I personally feel they are worth the admission. Gateway 3 is a massive letdown. Gateway is a simple, minimalist, atmospheric point-and-click adventure game with a number of equally simple logic puzzles, alongside a handful of basic movement puzzles. These are by no means mind-breaking, but a handful can be a bit obtuse (in a charming sorta way). The atmosphere itself carries a lot of the game. There's just this looming, overarching feeling of "otherness" to everything. Like you belong here...but also don't at the same time. Narrative elements are sparse, but what is there is enough to raise an eyebrow and keep the intrigue going. The ultimate goal seemingly to escape the bizarre dimension you exist in. Gateway 2 is like the first game, but better in almost every conceivable way. The puzzles are more varied, the atmosphere is even more foreboding, and the narrative is downright chilling at points. The central plot following a traumatized girl who is haunted by her mother's watchful eye, that you end up enraptured by immediately following your escape from the previous game. Not high art, but for a 2000s flash-based point-and-click, it was extremely solid. Being old enough now to better understand the concepts present in the narrative made me appreciate it even more. Gateway 3 feels like a joke. Gone are the decent point-and-click puzzles. Instead we have a tedious series of tile-based puzzles. Now the previous two games did have tile puzzles, and they were a notable weak point, but they never really overstayed their welcome. Here...it's almost entirely tile puzzles. Additionally, all of the text dialogue is written in braille for some reason. Least until the ending. Which, speaking of. The little bit of story we get at the end feels like it takes a massive dump on everything that came before it. And it sucks that they seem to want to show it off the third game as a highlight.\ Overall, I recommend this collection on the first two games alone. Even if it's just out of curiosity. Just don't waste time on the third game. I read some other reviews discussing bugs and performance issues, they must have since been fixed, as the only issues I've had so far were the shoddy collision detection regarding the Clone towards the end of the third game, and some minor text misplacement in the second game. Outside of that all three games performed flawlessly.