Magnetic: Cage Closed (2015)

Attracted: "These puzzles are designed to give you a sense of accomplishment even if all you did was place boxes where they belong"

Repelled: Every other line.

This is a portal clone that feels uninspired from the start. Right there, before you even start to play, you get a portal reference in the subtitle for the Prelude: "piece of cake". The setting is all to familiar. You are imprisoned in a secret weapons testing lab and you go through chambers solving puzzles to... gather data? Who, knows. Not important.

I can forgive a the derivative setting if the actual gameplay is enjoyable, but Magnetic: Cage Closed's puzzles are a total bust. Most chambers can be solved by following the most obvious path and there's almost no challenge in figuring out a solution.

The main mechanic has potential, though. A "magnetic" (more on that quotes later) gun that you can use to pull and push things metallic things. The game handles its introduction pretty well by giving you a small sandbox where you can test every element you are going to use through the game. You can manipulate boxes, platforms that come out of the walls, levers that activate things... the usual stuff. The catch is that Newton's third law applies. If you try to push a big box, you get pulled towards it.

But what at first sounds like an interesting twist to the formula, immediately becomes the centre of the game. Chambers are not solved, they are navigated. However, the main source of difficulty comes from how imprecise your movement is. One of the problems is that in order to perform a big jump, you need to be facing at your feet and "push" the ground, or "push" a wall to be thrown in the other direction. That essentially means that you often need to "jump" in the opposite direction that you are facing and hope that you get it right. The second issue is that many of the so-called puzzles require you to throw small boxes into far away buttons. Not the cubes are right in your face making it impossible to actually aim, but their actual trajectory once launched is almost random. The developers seemed to think that this was not enough of a nuisance and on the latter levels they put permanent magnets that actively deflect them.

That late-game addition is almost welcomed because for the most part you don't ever learn any other useful tricks beyond those you learn in the first couple of levels. Every element and its use is basically laid out in the first third of the game. The worse thing is that the game doesn't seem to notice it. The uncharismatic GLaDOS replacement introduced me to supposedly new elements (like spikes, or electric sparks) as if I hadn't encountered them half a dozen times already.

What passes as plot is worse than forgettable nonsense. The developers try so hard to get you involved by giving you meaningless "choices" and then telling you that there are 9 (nine!) possible endings. Of course, all those multiple endings don't translate to replay value because, for that I gather, puzzles are the same in matter your choices. Needless to say, I won't be repeating the same brain-dead "test chambers" 9 times for a nothing story.

A good illustration of how half-assed the whole setting is, le me talk about those quotes around "magnetic". You are an inmate whose captors give an ostensibly magnetic gun, but everything around you is made of metal. How could they miss the opportunity to create interesting looking chambers made of plastic, or glass, or full concrete instead of the most generic environments? Of course, your gun can only interact with some specific items. Why? Because. That's why.

This is a portal clone that feels uninspired from the start. Right there, before you even start to play, you get a portal reference in the subtitle for the Prelude: "piece of cake". The setting is all to familiar. You are imprisoned in a secret weapons testing lab and you go through chambers solving puzzles to... gather data?

Anyway. From my first 40-ish minutes of play, I can say that the puzzles are a total bust. The main mechanic has potential: a "magnetic" (more on that quotes later) gun that you can use to pull and push things (like the all to familiar boxes that activate buttons). The catch is that Newton's third law applies. You use the fact that you are pulled when you push to jump higher. In soviet Russia, the portals shoot you.

The problem is that the game's over-reliance on this mechanic basically translated in turning a puzzler into a bad platformer. Chambers are not solved, they are navigated. But in such an imprecise way, that I had to try the same jump a dozen times. So, yeah, the whole "performing the solution is harder than figuring it out" issue is in full force. Even worse is the game's other abused mechanic of having to throw cubes to far away cubes. The problem is not only that the cube is right in your face, making it impossible to actually aim, but the actual trajectory of the cube once launched is almost random.

Oh, and about that quotes. Is ridiculous. You have ostensibly a "magnetic gun" but you can only interact with some specific items even though everything around you is made of f-ing metal. Why? Because. In Portal, portals could also only be placed in some specific surfaces, of course, but if you can accept a magical gun that makes portals, then is not a stretch to accept that there's also some anti-portal surface coating. But if you introduce a magnetic gun, then you need to give me some explanation to why I does nothing with the metallic floor I'm standing on.

And this is not just cosmetic. Remember how in Portal you could break cameras by placing portals in their walls? That was an important mechanic that allowed the player to express themselves; a small act of rebellion,if you will. In this game, not only your magnetic gun does nothing to those metallic cameras, but you can throw boxes all they long and they will go right through them as if they were not even there.