The Bridge Review

The Bridge simply doesn’t confer the exacting controls required to perform its feats of physics. The professor’s a far cry from agile, and any small degree of rotation is bound to send him stumbling down the plane of decline (with an annoying “shuffling” sound effect, to boot). The trajectory of his falls is difficult to gauge. He’s unable to fight against the pull of vortices that draw him in at unfathomable distances. Such issues are annoyances in the main campaign, and outright headache-inducing during an extra set of bonus levels that are unlocked after its completion. In these altered versions of the regular levels, a greater number of hazards are introduced, and dexterity and momentum take on a greater role in successful level completion. In other words, the things that The Bridge is worst at come to the fore. There’s more challenge to be had here at least, even if much of the adversity is ill-gained.

I’d have hoped for the difficulty of The Bridge’s puzzles to derive more from play on perspective than from niggling physics. For all the depth and mystery of the levels, it’s a tremendous disappointment that your primary method of interacting with them is to simply rotate them and walk about on their profile. I wanted to pick at them, to move their pieces, to ascend their crooked ladders and stairways, to walk into the sideways doors and come out in another location upside-down. You do little of that sort in The Bridge, unfortunately. The bizarre accoutrements that line the levels turn out to be largely decorative, and making sense of the traversable portions of each stage isn’t nearly as taxing as one might expect given the source material. More’s the pity - there’s a lot to love about The Bridge’s look, but it doesn’t have much bearing on mechanics or plot.

Lip service is paid to an overarching narrative (something about an assistant and a death), but there’s almost nothing to work with. There’s but a scant bit of text to prop up The Bridge’s story between stages, and it’s so vague as to be meaningless. That it’s included at all seems to just be a nod towards genre convention; indie puzzle games are expected to allude to deeper meaning, and so the game puts on its high-falutin’ airs. But the effort isn’t earnest, and like much else in The Bridge, it doesn’t command interest. It’s content to pose a few contrived questions about perception and infinity, then abandon them to wander off in search of the next rolling ball puzzle.