Now you're thinking with por-- oh, oh no. Oh no.

The perspective-bending puzzles in Gateways have quite an arc.

At first, the game is little more than an amateurish platformer. There are enemies, there are spikes. The running and jumping controls are, well, not very good. It isn't too long before the titular gateway gun shows up, though, which introduces some Portal-styled locomotion puzzles: how to get across long gaps, how to reach high ledges, how to use momentum in portal jumps, et cetera. But since it's all in two dimensions, puzzles stay pretty easy for this portion of the game.

Then there are new puzzle items to work with. A mirror that reflects light at an angle; a new gun that shrinks or enlarges the player character. Brain-teasing, intellectually-interesting puzzles. Neat stuff.

Then there is a time machine. Immediately, the time-warp gun triples the complexity of the game. It took me a good while to get acclimated to how the damn thing worked, and I'm still learning how to actually use it effectively. And, just for funsies, the game tosses in upgrades and puzzles that increase the number of parallel time folds. Yeah. Fucking brutal.

And then! Then. Then - following an interlude with a gun that rotates the map - there is the "multi gun." See, up to this point, switching gun types - gateway, resize, time, rotate - disabled the effect of whatever gun was previously in use. But with the multi-gun, everything can be in play at the same time. Let's just combine resizing mechanics and teleportation and spatial rotation with time travel, because, why not! Goddamn. It's bonkers and I am in awe of it.

Unfortunately, even when it's pulling off physics tricks that put Antichamber to shame, Gateways still suffers from unpolished controls. It's way too easy to step out of a time portal and into a paradox, purely by accident. It's way too easy to screw up a routine cliff-climbing maneuver from slipping a few pixels too far over a ledge. And it's way too easy to get confused about where a rotation is going, because there isn't a clear image of what's on the other side of the portal.

I don't usually keep playing games when their basic controls frustrate me as much as Gateways's are. Nor when the technical performance is this shaky; portal effects aside, there's no good reason for framerate to suffer when the graphical fidelity is this low. But I really want to see this one through -- if only to shove it in the game's face, and spite it for believing itself better than me.

Progress: 64%