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.