The Bridge is a 2D logic puzzle game that forces the player to reevaluate their preconceptions of physics and perspective. It is Isaac Newton meets M. C. Escher. Manipulate gravity to redefine the ceiling as the floor while venturing through impossible architectures. Explore increasingly difficult worlds, each uniquely detailed and designed to leave the player with a pronounced sense of intellectual accomplishment...

There are dozens of 2D puzzle games like this available for free on the PC, but I've not played one that delivers such an engaging experience as with The Bridge. The game has beautifully hand-drawn art in the style of a black-and-white lithograph and a creepy, yet soothing soundtrack.

The controls are simple, the execution... well, that's up to you. The left and right triggers are used to rotate the screen clockwise/anticlockwise, while the analogue stick is used to move your character around the environment. So, in this world, you can turn your house around 360 degrees so that the walls and ceiling also become the floor.

There are 48 scenarios to work through starting from the fairly easy levels where you just have to walk from the start point to the door in the room. These quickly osculate in difficulty so that you also have to reach a key to unlock the door; avoid deadly giant balls in the environment and keep away from deadly vortex's that trap you or the key if you get too close. If you a quashed by the giant ball, get trapped by a vortex, or just want to back track a bit because you realise the path you're on won't lead to you completing the level, you simply hold down the B button, which then rewinds time to a point where you want to continue. If you die a ghost image of your character is left in place to help you remember where you went wrong.

The later levels, where you really have to think, see you with the ability to pass through dimensions. There's the normal black and white dimension and then the dimension which seems to have had the grey and black elements drained from it. In this state all of the black and white objects behave in the opposite way you'd expect, so the balls roll up hill and the keys hang straight up in the air. You can only interact with keys and doors in your dimension - which makes getting a white key and opening a black and white door more of a challenge.

If I had one slight grumble it's that the puzzles, on the whole, don't actually take that long to figure out and so I rushed through the main game quite quickly. But this will make for an enjoyable afternoon and it's fun to watch other members of your family try and work their way through the puzzles once you've completed them.

8

Darren Rea