All of us have, at some point of our lives, solved a puzzle. There may be even people who are puzzle fans and love the challenges they offer. Bad thing is, once the riddle is solved, the magic is gone; we will be able to solve any similar event thanks to the experience previously acquired.
It may seem that this is the issue with The Bridge, as you feel you know the solutions to all challenges on the game once you’ve solved one of them; besides, its naïve aesthetic appearance helps to make you confident and lower your guard for next settings. Thinking this way and believing this game can’t possibly beat you, it’s a mistake; once you go forward to the next level, the game intellectually slaps you so hard as to leave you broken down, even more so when you will be overwhelmed by the gloomy side of its style thanks to your defeat before the game. The Bridge is the two-sided game, it’s bipolar, it’s the evil image on the other side of the mirror; therefore, if you think you are strong enough to cross to the other side of the bridge, I invite you to keep reading.
Game mechanics for The Bridge are simple enough: your character can move left and right and you can tilt the stage in these same directions. No problems so far. Settings impose the playable paranoia, as all of them are based on those impossible figures loved by psychologists and mathematicians alike; they destroy your spatial logics and transform a simple move to the left into an odyssey, since you can end up doing all sorts of things except the one that you wanted, which was moving to the left.
In general, our main goal will be retrieving one or several keys in each level and open the door to the next stage; but this will be a very challenging task in these logically illogical settings. Then, the game turns it up a notch and at that point your brain will tell you to stop playing and your pride will tell you to go on. As if having to rearrange your spatial ideas wasn’t enough, this game adds an enemy in the form of a macabre ball that will kill you as soon as you touch it and you get a game over if you «kill» it; so you need to take its behaviour into account when you plan your moves, so you can use it to your advantage while keeping it as far from you as possible.
However, the icing on this gameplay isn’t this spherical opponent but the dimensional and spatial paradoxes that you can use in different settings: gravity alteration, which affects only certain movable elements on the setting; changing to another dimension where you turn white and can go through the illusions of each level by different paths; black holes you must use to move forward but you won’t be able to leave if you get trapped inside; or going back in time in order to correct your mistakes, in the style of Braid.
Best thing is when you think it’s all finished, that you’ve beaten this game that slaps you in the face once more by showing you a mirror mode where all the levels that you faced are reversed; this subtle change makes you face a degree of difficulty I’ve seen very few times in a game and that, I must admit, has beaten me. Maybe I’m stupid or slow, but my pride is hurt; I wasn’t able to cross the bridge and I didn’t manage to see all the dark story present in the game. The challenge is still there so that I may keep trying in future games and uncover its hidden secrets.
In short, this game is pure mental agility, a challenge that puts you on the ropes; the worst thing is that you like the harm, awakening a sadomasochistic side that you didn’t know you had. In addition, as if all of this wasn’t enough, if you want to know the plot, you will have to assemble it by collecting picture fragments among several levels. These will reveal more facts about the main character of the game and its surroundings, so you will get even more obstacles
to wrack your brains.
This game doesn’t have any final bosses, fast action, or hordes. But it makes it very clear that your only enemy is your own brain and your predetermined and single way of approaching the world. If you really think you’re brave, The Bridge is the perfect title to let down your delusions of grandeur and finally make you realize that reality is never what it seems.
