Prelogate is a puzzle game where you must guide lasers to their goals. While it looks easy at first glance, what lies within is one of the most challenging puzzle games I’ve played.
Prelogate has a small story to it – you are a test subject and must complete tests to get the system going. Sounds slightly familiar? Well, don’t worry, the game knows it too. It even takes no issue with the references, with a “SPAAAAACE” mention in the tutorial. But of course, the story isn’t the main focus here (and I honestly didn’t read most of it) – the puzzles are!
The puzzles start out simple. Place some devices and guide the laser to the end. You are gradually introduced to more devices and what they do is basic. For example, the mirror will reflect the laser to another direction, the splitter will split the beam off to another direction, and the diffuser sends the beam off in 4 directions. There’ll also be color mixing introduced. And then it all goes to hell in difficulty.
Logic gates get introduced.
Now let’s keep in mind that I was playing through this game with someone who took Logic in university. Okay? Yeah. Logic gates got introduced and the difficulty just spiked hard. It didn’t help that the descriptions of each logic gate was… slightly lackluster. They’ve slightly patched this since I started playing, though really only the IF gate got a fix (states how it works). Good luck understanding the XOR gates! Even after beating the game I don’t know if we fully understood them yet…
Edit: It seems a small tutorial was added in to Chapter 4 level 1. It was added after I had played this chapter though, so I had missed it.
Then comes the point where you need to make logic gates. The XOR and Triple XOR levels… My head STILL hurts from them. Yeah, this game caused me to have a few headaches. But, we persevered! The difficulty did start to wobble all over in some places. Some levels seemed way too insanely easy to be in the later chapters. Especially the maze ones, but perhaps that’s because I’m at least somewhat decent at mazes.
After all that though, I still enjoyed it. Yes it was hard. Yes I got a fair few headaches from it. But it was fun. There was a sense of accomplishment knowing I made it to the end… even if the ending was slightly what? Even after beating it, I’ve booted it up a few times already just to try and improve on some of my solutions and to try and make them even better.
Speaking of improving solutions, Prelogate does have leaderboards! While originally there was no way to view them in game (could only do so through the Steam client), there has been a patch since that lets you boot them up from in game. Granted, it still pulls up the Steam leaderboards but hey it’s better than not knowing how to get to them at all!
Also introduced in a patch since I started, a color blind mode was added. While definitely very helpful as this game is definitely very reliant on color, even for the non-colorblind it helps. Once it was added I turned it on for every level that was remaining and boy did it make things easier. Being able to easily see what was or wasn’t on, especially once you got pretty far into a solution that was over multiple steps, was a great help.
If you are into hard puzzle titles that WILL make your head hurt, check out Prelogate. I definitely don’t suggest trying to get through it for your first time in one sitting (unless you’re a super genius). Especially for the price, Prelogate is more than worth it. Of course, it still doesn’t compare to SpaceChem in difficulty but it is pretty high up there.
Prelogate Review Score
4/5
It would be great if the logic gates were described even better. Also, the ending was still somewhat… weird to me. It’s still overall pretty good and highly suggested to folks who are looking for a challenge.
I would like to thank the developer for providing me with a copy for review.
Prelogate is available now on Steam.
