Ok, so I've just finished the game for the first time (replaying soon because I still need that sweet, sweet 100% engineer mode achievement!) but I wanted to get my immediate feedback at 14.4hrs in onto paper :P
Firstly, a bit of my background. At time of writing, I'm a researcher in Computational Chemistry, and have a keen interest in quantum computing and electronics. I mention this as I think I'm not your typical audience, as not every gamer will have my experience with these kinds of things.
Onto the review! Spoilers abound from here on out so don't read on if you care about those!
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The Art Style: I absolutely love it! The art deco/futuristic vibes are great, and work really well in all three areas. The Digital area is nice- very minimalist, allowing me to focus on what's actually going on. The Analog area is simply gorgeous. I think my favourite art, however, has to be the qubits. I love how they're visualised! The hub world with the nature intertwined was also beautiful.
Gameplay and Accessibility: Gnerally fun. I enjoyed the three choices of difficulty level- it was fun to try and complete the digital levels on engineer mode, even though finding the door to the programmable display took a friend to tell me where it is (who, I believe, asked on the steam forums!) The hub world was great to seperate everything out, and the layout of the puzzles was generally good. I enjoyed the interactive pull-button-things, and they gave a good break in between puzzles to encourage me to stop and think. The addition of an FOV slider was a great addition- I get motion sick with some games like this (Talos being one) so I'm glad that was added as it really helped. Moving pieces around in Digital and Analog was a little annoying at the start, but I gradually got used to the quirks of moving things. Finally, I loved discovering the three little "easter eggs" around the place! I didn't have many problems with my colourblindness either, which was excellent. Finally, the audio was beautiful and I can't get enough of it.
My top three puzzles:
3. Analog: The Computer Puzzle. Took a minute to realise I only had 10 commands! It was a really good learning moment- I tried something, it didn't work, I realised why- I had to reformulate my original plan. More stages of this might get tedious, but it could be cool to have more input sequences with different command lists needed; e.g. 55, 89, 144, 233 (Fibbonacci numbers, a real "what do these have in common" until you realise it!).
2. Digital: Floor 8. To finish the rest of Digital, only to come across floor 8 and discover it to be a giant mess of wires and complexity: then slowly unpacking it, working out that it's 4 memory registers and a binary adder, then working out what values to add together and in what order... oh, yes, when it worked! Only one thing can beat that feeling, which is...
1. Quantum: The opening two puzzles in the Quantum section. I really enjoyed learning how these worked and how Quantum computing had been implemented into the game. I do have some feedback more generally on this though, so I'll leave it there for now.
My bottom three puzzles (Apart from number one, which I'm still salty about, these still are a solid 7/10 so it's not like these are bad!):
3. Quantum: As I said I'll touch more on this in a second, but I was and wasn't a fan of the big quantum computer. I still loved the design, though, and finding the D-Wave logo on the back of it made my day :P
2. Analog: 5 buttons, Rotating Circles in a box. I still don't know how I got the second signal to light up to complete the puzzle, or why it didn't light up when I lined up all of the openings with the left side the first 4 times.
1. Analog: The pile-of-sugar-like waveform on the right side of the play area (by the exit of the signals). Urgh, I spent over three hours tweaking, testing and retesting this one. This was such a hurdle. Ironically, the variable waveforms posed less of a challenge, even though for a friend of mine they proved to be much more difficult.
Thoughts on Quantum Section: So, this may be a specific gripe from me and me alone, but... the Quantum section left me the teenciest bit disappointed. During the final few Analog puzzles, I was thinking about the Quantum stuff coming up- and getting all hyped up about it! I spent the late evening refreshing my memory of the Bloch sphere, Toffoli gates, bit swaps, and all that fun stuff. I went to bed thinking about how the space would be represented- a holoraphic 3d model of a sphere showing where on the Bloch sphere the qubit is at any one point? Passing those bits through quantum gates and changing them to bias an outcome... ooh, the possibilities (pun intended)! So this morning I open up my laptop to finish off the game and... Ok, 1 qubit, manipulation and biasing, ok... two coupled qubits, ok... 4 qubits... ok, this is getting tedious... and then it just... ends. I checked the 2 coupled qubits, and I'm pretty sure that for values of 1,0,-1 for all three settings (2 Qubits and Correlator) they're fully deterministic, which was... saddening. I'm pretty sure that most of this is because I've got some experience with QM previously, and that the descision not to do something like this was a practical one both from a coding perspective and also from an audience perspective. You don't want to create a situation where you either have a degree in physics or can't complete the game- and that's ok. I hyped up the end in my mind to an unrealistic point, but I can't help but feel like something's been missed. I hate to say this is a critisism- there are legitimite reasons for not doing the end like this! However...
Three things I'd hypothetically want in a paid DLC, if this was to ever happen:
1. Better/More (potentially optional) Quantum puzzles. The Long Gate: Quantum Conundrum has a ring to it, no?
2. More time-dependent puzzles in the Analog section. Manipulating analog time waveforms to create a new state. The idea of standing waves- oh, I've got a time-dependent peak moving left to right, and my output is a... it's a peak that grows and shrinks... and I've got a device labelled "delay" and a device labelled "negate"... and an adder, of course. What if I... oh, that's cool! I can add them together and get a steady state!
3. Mixed puzzles. Quantum Gates operating to produce digital outputs that control analogue signals, which represent the wavefunction for a quantum system... and all that nice stuff. Combine the three things we've learned!
Story: Whilst there's no overt story, I've got a whole page of notes on things I picked up on that have my storytelling brain in overdrive right now!
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Overall: Thank you, David, for a great experience! I'm definitely glad I picked The Long Gate up. Looking forwards to your next project! :D
