Game review: The Bridge

By this I mean a video game with a unique look and feel and a brand new style of gameplay. One of these is The Bridge, created by Ty Taylor and Mario Castaneda which takes the form of an abstract mind boggler created to test our logic problem solving skills. Not only does it successfully do this but it also sports a very unique hand drawn sketchy look, and a feeling of being alone in a kind of alternate reality.

The Bridge sees players controlling a sketched male character who finds himself trapped in a rotating world filled with traps and puzzles. The player is required to plod through the many intricate and expertly designed puzzles without getting killed by any of the enemies and traps introduced after the first few levels.

Not a lot of story present here, it is more of a straight up puzzle game that just plops you in the game world and kind of says “there you go, do these puzzles”, and after the first couple of levels, you have to then trust your logic to solve these levels without help.

To solve the puzzles, players are required to rotate the world as well as control the players character to find their way to an exit door placed somewhere on the level. Sounds easy but it’s not, you will definitely find yourself stuck a hell of a lot, which is the main appeal to The Bridge however, a help button or something to assist the player would have increased the playability of it. What I mean is the difficult puzzles make the pacing of The Bridge drag profusely; sometimes I turned off the game as I was stuck and thought I would come back to it later.

The Bridge gets more difficult as the player progresses, introducing enemies which don’t kill the player when touched, instead the game ends but the player is required to use a key that rewinds time similar to the game Braid. There is no set time that the player can rewind however meaning the player can take it right back to the beginning if needed.

The Bridge takes on a black and white sketched look, which brings a stylish feel to the whole experience and sets it apart from the rest. The worlds are ingeniously built using curves and upside down items that look confusing until the player proceeds forth to try and solve the puzzle set in front of them.

The generic look of the main character shows us that he doesn’t really matter and is more of an avatar than an actual character you are meant to care about, but he is hand drawn and looks highly detailed which I found quite impressive. Enemies are more balls with intimidating looking faces drawn on them, and only move corresponding to how the player moves the game world, so the enemies are more obstacles that mustn’t be touched rather than actual enemies hell bent on killing the player.

The only fault is the slow pacing as mentioned before, caused by the extensive thinking process required to complete the constantly difficult levels. No fast paced action, no explosions or blockbuster cinematics, The Bridge is meant to be slow and definitely meant to be thought about and not rushed.

Summary

2 guys have created quite a masterpiece of a puzzler that made me rack my brains over and over through the many difficult puzzles presented before me. The Bridge tests the players intelligence to such a degree that you will most likely begin to question it. I enjoyed The Bridge and recommend it to any players that think they are geniuses; I bet this would show you otherwise.

The Bridge

Developers: Ty Taylor and Mario Castaneda

Publishers: Ty Taylor and Mario Castaneda

Genre: Puzzle

Release Date: 22nd February 2013

Story – 2/5

Graphics – 4/5

Gameplay – 4/5

Overall – 4/5

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