Simply put, The Bridge is a king hell bastard puzzle game that will, in any single puzzle, require your brain to not only comprehend but also maneuver up to three different layers of gravity and two ‘black & white worlds’ of reflection, both of which, in any given puzzle, may be occupied by Indiana Jones-like stone spheres, vortexes, and black and/or white keys and their corresponding locks. Everything affects everything else; changing one thing changes everything. The Bridge’s aesthetics is a bedeviling coverup to the fact that the game is pure spatial lunacy. And my brain cannot do this kind of processing. It.just.can’t. I am not wired to be able to patiently envision and enact the solution to these puzzles. My right parietal lobe must be swollen like a raisin or something. The only axons that must be active there are the ones that are still connected to my prefrontal cortex because, like a fat kid with moobs trying to play basketball with the rest of the gym class, whenever the solution to a puzzle exceeds what the axons are capable of they fire currents all the way to the other side of my brain which triggers the impulse to punch my monitor. Dark Souls didn’t even make me rage quit this much.
And, to an effect, co-opping with my brother in Portal 2 has also revealed just how deficient – how squishy – my spatial constructing abilities are. My brother, a bicycle mechanic, and who, upon purchasing a dissembled piece of furniture, can take a single glance at the instructions and piece that sucker together in the same amount of time it would take me, if charged with the same task, to play with my poo-poo. In Portal I’d stand there at the entrance to a new puzzle and would be pondering the mysteries of the universe while sucking my thumb and he would be running around, scoping the place out, and devising our escape. I’m lots of fun to play with.
So, The Bridge isn’t the enemy. Portal 2 isn’t the enemy. AntiChamber isn’t the enemy (Don’t EVEN get me started with Antichamber.) And my brother certainly isn’t the enemy. The enemy here is my flacid right parietal lobe.
– This “Day One Edition” business sort of bothers me. Do I pick up this edition even though I probably won’t be getting a Day One Console? This is a decision I should not be making.
– A week away from the launch of a new generation, play this classic from five generations ago.
– Has Mario Party been fun lately? I enjoyed the Gamecube version, but just barely. It has potential but it just hasn’t been great lately.
