The Bridge Review

It’s a promising start, but sadly, The Bridge goes on to eschew its unique aspects in favor of well-trod ground. Escher's influence quickly gets relegated to cosmetic duties, while the more rote, limited gravity-based physics system does all the heavy lifting. This results in a systemic problem: the game feels held back by its chosen methods of interaction. The character’s single-axis movement and the rotation of the levels are really the only two variables under the player's control, and each is binary. Left or right, clockwise or counter-clockwise...there are only so many possibilities that can result. A great many of the stages, consequently, can be beaten by simply spinning the environment arbitrarily as you wander about. Sure, there’s some novelty to walking on ceilings. But this transition happens through the lazy spin of the level that you orchestrate, so there’s no dizzying sense of displacement here. Just slowly walking, slowly falling, slowly being crushed by the odd boulder.

Indeed, there are a great many boulders crashing about within The Bridge’s floating puzzles. There are also vortices that draw in nearby matter, sliding doors, and other items from video games of yore. They’re a bid for variety, but alas, two of the five levels in each world are expended teaching their ins and outs through basic tutorials, so there’s not much room for them to develop. Nor do these introduced objects seem to have anything to do with the game’s overarching narrative. There's no explanation for, say, a vortex to suddenly make an appearance in The Bridge, nor a veil that suspends the protagonist while the rest of the stage rotates. Consequently, they feel like arbitrary, lazy uses of video game convention. Herein lies a problem that The Bridge exacerbates by its invocation of Braid, a game that wove each of its iterative mechanics into its plot and motif far more effectively.

Fall victim to one of those hazards, or otherwise render the level unbeatable, and you’ll need to rely on another Braid staple: rewinding time. It’s not typically necessary; most of the game’s levels are short enough that it’s actually quicker to restart than to wait for the rewind mechanic’s slow acceleration. On the few occasions when it proves useful, it’s because some finicky bit of interaction is difficult to properly execute. One might find, for example, that it’s difficult to get the professor to fall at an exacting angle necessary to avoid an obstacle, or for a rolling boulder to have the proper amount of momentum required to trigger a switch. On such occasions, success comes only at the end of a tiresome loop of rewinds, minor adjustments, and hairline failures. Such repetitious defeats can even make one wonder if they’ve taken the wrong tack entirely - there’s a real potent frustration in arriving at the solution but being unable to perform it to the game’s stringent standards.