Dragon's Gate

Before I played the game I was drawn in by it's simplistic charm. I expected a comfy experience. The game was unencrypted and inside the project file I could see there weren't many maps. And knowing this was made for a "swap in the middle with 2" event I wasn't expecting much.

The Puzzles

There are 6 gates to "connect" which are opened by solving the riddle. The solutions are rather straight forward but a few were not so intuitive. In my opinion, the first puzzle was the most difficult. It involves standing in a statue's line of sight, which is a diagonal. It's easy to miss the fact that statues' eyes glow red, since they are only few pixels on an already dark tinted screen.
The fact that it was night and snowing could have been used to a greater effect, revealing of a laser beam or something.
A later puzzle is essentially the same puzzle as the first with one less step. But again, a diagonal line of sight is not obvious at all.

The hint to another puzzle expects the player to be using a gamepad or have knowledge of Rpg Maker's Input scheme. Where "X" on a gamepad is actually "A" on the keyboard.

Overall I think there was a lack of feedback. When solving a puzzle the exit would glow. But the gate is inevitably off screen. The characters don't have anything to say. All you hear is a short chime indicating success.

The Story

It exists mostly as a premise. Two character solve the riddles of the dragon gate. It doesn't explain why these gates exist. How the characters know about it. What the character's motivations are.
Giving it any more than a passing thought raises questions: Why is the ice gate the ice gate? Is it always snowing there? Why are all the other gates in some pocket dimension? Why is the ice gate the only one with dragon motifs? There were more gate puzzles featuring a statue of the Goddess Hel.

The Collaboration

The story concludes with a character narrating an event that supposedly happened while you were solving one of the puzzle gate. It's strange and vague, and the only real take away is the knowledge that "dragons were/are real".
It's the failing of almost every collaboration story out there. The setup is interesting, but someone else has to decide where it's going and what the point is. This is where most collaboration projects die. That decision making process has to be more challenging than designing process itself.
The ending of Dragon's Gate was forced, but the fact that it was concluded at all is respectable.