Beyond the Gate

We've all played at least one game where the plot twist in the end was that the main character was dead all along. But what if rather than making that the plot twist, you made it something that was revealed from the start, and made the rest of the game about what happens afterwards? Beyond the Gate is basically the result.

The story has a good base idea, the main character has to fight their inner demons so that they can pass on to the mysterious ''afterlife''. In her journey, she is being guided by death, who is quite philosophical it seems. There isn't really much to the game. You explore a hospital and fight some spirits and such. Now the battles are actually extremely easy, and all I did the entire game was just attack (in fact, I started using auto battle since it basically just attacks for me.) You get a few different skills throughout the game, but all them are pretty much useless and you probably won't be using any of them even once. You'll probably want to avoid the enemies anyway as the rewards you get for beating them are extremely useless (usually 1 exp and 2 gold) and the only level ups you get will be from the bosses. There's a few little bugs too, especially the fact that you can interact with some objects without facing them.



There really isn't much to the game except for one thing: the aesthetics. The graphics are quite nice, accompanied by great mapping. I really liked some of the little details thrown in, such as how the character looks like she's running as she walks. The ''dungeon design'' is pretty ok. Usually the areas are short and won't take more than like 2 minutes to get through (unless you try to fight every enemy for whatever reason, or you get stuck with the password like me in the second ''dungeon'')
On that note, the puzzle for the second ''dungeon'' is quite confusing. You basically get a bunch of numbers from books scattered around, but it doesn't tell you what the order is. There are some words next to the numbers, but I had no idea what they were implying. The hint was too obscure, I think, and I ended up finding the password by random guesses.

The story was decent enough that I enjoyed it, however, I didn't find any of the characters to be likeable. It can sort of be excused that there wasn't enough time to develop the characters since the game is only about 20 minutes long, but there are other games where I absolutely loved characters in about 10 minutes. Granted it's usually because they're funny or hot, but uhh, still.

Beyond the Gate is definetly okay, but sort of boring with nothing to really make it stand out. It's neither good nor bad, but it's worth the try if you want a quick 20 minute long rpg. I give it three ghosts out of five.