Enter one, and you leave the other at a corresponding size. The second gun creates two portals - but one's huge and one's tiny. It's here that the game's vision and its potential begin rippling outwards from your avatar. The lack of a third dimension or any physics (or, indeed, cubes) hamstrings Gateways slightly, but it's still jolly to tumble through the game's environments. Gateways' opening hour is the closest parallel of Portal, and it's perfectly fine. Succeeding is fun, but so is developing vocabulary and fluency, so to speak, with the toy. These games present you with an intimidatingly powerful yet satisfying toy for manipulating your environment, then drop you before a series of increasingly taxing obstacles. It's similar to the appeal of Braid, Fez or World of Goo. How do you use portals to cross gaps? To jump high? To open doors?

This passes, at which point you have the framework for a fabulous puzzle game.

Initially, this leads to you feeling sick as you see yourself through holes you shouldn't be able to see yourself through. In Portal (and Gateways) you're gifted with a gun that can create two 'portals', or pathways, between two flat surfaces. A scientist wakes up in what's left of his lab, everything's scattered uselessly about the place, and your task is to steer your little Mario-alike to the surface. Just remove Portal's jokes and storytelling and swap in a sprawling, Metroidvania-style single environment with plenty of backtracking and you're there. It is overwhelmingly inspired by Portal, as developer Smudged Cat Games (which also made The Adventures of Shuggy) is only too happy to admit.Īnd if you've played Portal, you'll know almost exactly what to expect from this £3 title available on Xbox Indie Games and PC, since it plays almost exactly like a £3 Portal. Each click is a fold in the fabric of spacetime, meticulously crafting each origami solution. Gateways challenges you to navigate a cramped underground lab by manipulating time and space itself.

Diablo 2 no gateway