Quest For The Worst Adventure Game Puzzle SPECIAL - Golden Gate (1997): Vince Zampella's Weird Forgotten Myst Clone
by zombiepie
Practically Everyone Was In The Myst Mines In The 90s
It may not completely crack onto a supposed Mount Rushmore of "Most Influential" or "Most Consequential" video games, depending on how you set your metrics. Still, there's no doubt about it: Myst ruled the PC gaming sphere for practically a decade. Despite Doom, Command & Conquer, Half-Life, Diablo II, Tomb Raider, Fallout, StarCraft, and many other "titans" of PC gaming dominating conversations and headlines, Myst stood above them as the best-selling PC game and maintained that status until 2000, when The Sims was released. Sure, being the best-selling game on a platform isn't an indicator of "quality," and as I shared in my write-up rebutting editorials calling Scorn "Myst-like," I don't demand you to like Myst or Riven. However, as I have said before, and will once again repeat here, what you shouldn't do is continue the same false narrative that with the decline of Sierra Online or LucasArts represented a "Dark Age" for the adventure game, or that the genre "died" in the early 2000s. That Dark Age never existed, and if you believe it did, you are actively impugning the legacy of the works of the Miller brothers, Charles Cecil, Ragnar Thornquist, Benoit Sokal, and the entire non-USA adventure game community, which kept the torch alive until TellTale and crowd-funding brought back a wave of traditional graphical adventure games.
And to continue with my little screed in defense of Myst, more often than not, when people try to rattle off the reasons why they dislike Myst, they're more often than not, instead describing a cheap Myst-like or clone rather than the game itself. What has always stuck out to me as the most forward-thinking design aspect of Myst or the works of the Miller Brothers is the emphasis on every significant monument or feature in the foreground or background being a tangible interactable that you can reach, touch, and discern a purpose too; that's not something you saw anywhere else in the 1990s and is a game design rarity still to this day. The wholeness of Myst's worldbuilding is rarely echoed in the games it spawned after its release. There are a few Myst-likes that do scratch this itch; Alida, Celtica, Lighthouse: The Dark Being, and Zork Grand Inquisitor come to mind, but they also introduce new shortcomings on top of the expected ones in following Myst's template. But suppose the genre was on the verge of extinction with the death of SCUMM-based point-and-click games. Why were so many game studios on the Myst and multimedia Hype Train and churning out multimedia slideshows, interactive encyclopedias, or outright Myst clones? Anyone still in PC game development during the heyday of the 90s worked on at least one, even if it wasn't in their normal purview, and for a perfect example, look no further than Vince Zampella, a man who has always been in the FPS, action-adventure, or competitive online game sphere. And yet, even HE produced a Myst clone!
I don't bring up the specter of Golden Gate to indict Vince Zampella or the start of his career that saw him inexorably tied to the 3DO. For those unaware, Zampella's first venture in the gaming industry saw him working at Game Tech and in the trenches of TV tie-in game adaptations before moving to Atari and the Jaguar console. However, it was when Zampella relocated to Panasonic Interactive and 3DO that the producer we know today first emerged. It didn't matter that the game that got greenlit, Golden Gate, was a Myst clone, because it still had ambitious narrative goals as well as sky-high production values for what many outsiders might dismiss as a derivative work. The cutscenes were FMV-based, but that was the norm at the time; what wasn't was the deft touch in including an implied narrative or story that you needed to piece together through in-game context clues and puzzles. The acting with the characters is at times spotty, but Zampella and his team squeeze as much blood from this stone as you can imagine. I can't help but see the emotional highs of Medal of Honor, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Titanfall 2, or Star Wars Jedi: Survivor at least partially here, which makes it a meaningful learning experience and a case study on how the Myst clone wasn't always about insctruible button-based puzzles or code input brain teasers. And that inevitably leads me to my sales pitch for Golden Gate.
What Is Golden Gate (1997)?
Golden Gate is the lone game project associated with developer iX Entertainment, and documentation about them is sparse. The best I could determine is that they released the PC version of Golden Gate, and while a 3DO port was in development, given the console's association with numerous multimedia projects, neither of their financial performances panned out as expected. What does have more documentation is the publisher of Golden Gate, Panasonic Interactive Media Company (i.e., PIM). Though a subsidiary of the well-known Japanese consumer electronics and heavy industry manufacturer Panasonic, PIM was located in Santa Clara, California, just a short distance from the heart of Silicon Valley. PIM became Panasonic's attempt to enter the video game industry, and they released numerous edutainment and multimedia titles throughout their history. As one of the strongest supporters of Trip Hawkins' 3DO endeavor and a reliable supplier of new IPs and game titles, Panasonic played a significant role in filling store shelves with multimedia-based video games for the 3DO. So much so, in 1996, they bought up full-magazine spreads advertising software and titles for the console, even when the writing was on the wall that the 3DO was on its last leg of hardware and software support. One of the games in Panasonic's final push to get people interested in the 3DO was Golden Gate, which came out a whole year after the 3DO Company offloaded its M2 successor hardware to Panasonic. That same year, PIM acquired the "exclusive" North American distribution rights to ALL of 7th Level's Monty Python games, so the company as a whole was still very much interested in game development.
Golden Gate itself is simple to summarize. It's a point-and-click adventure game structured as a series of slides or static images, which, as its title might suggest, are set in San Francisco and various parts of the California Bay Area. Golden Gate's images are all 360-degree photos, which require you to rotate around them to search for clues and possible entryways and exits. The game artistically enhances some of these images to create a more dreamlike or impressionistic atmosphere, with watercolor-like visuals that aim to elevate the game beyond being just a series of photos. The game's opening narration presents you with your task: finding a long-rumored treasure that dates back centuries, which has doomed all those who have attempted to locate it. As you grow closer to this treasure, you watch FMV cutscenes that show the fates of various would-be treasure hunters, as well as one of the people who is competing to beat you, Jake T. Matthews. If there is a criticism to direct against Golden Gate, it is that many of these cutscenes take place in small viewfinders or pop-ups that don't occupy the entire screen and are thus difficult to watch. The times when FMV actors appear on your screen are also rough because sometimes the actors were not entirely chroma-keyed correctly and don't entirely mesh with the lighting of the background you are in when they appear. Likewise, and your mileage may vary, but whole swaths of the game's worldbuilding and story are told through diary pages or non-narrated in-game text. The text is well-written, but it is largely non-interactive. What stands the test of time is the game's original soundtrack.
Mechanically, the game plays looser with the Myst template and provides you with more choices than you'd expect. There are limits to its non-linear format, as you are still gravitating towards the same end goal, which requires the same inputs. However, the minute the game starts, it presents you with an open-ended question: Do you want to heed the advice of a rival treasure hunter and avoid searching an abandoned mansion or not? You shouldn't listen to them because the mansion has some required materials for your quest, but you don't need to enter it first if you don't want to. Golden Gate also introduces a handful of quality-of-life improvements that many other Myst-likes, and even the works of the Miller brothers, would have benefited from borrowing. First, the game features a fast-travel map, which allows you to instantly warp to a location without needing to memorize a route or a series of in-game inputs to reach that destination. Likewise, it plays audio cues whenever you are next to or near a location that will either unlock a cutscene or a quest item. Finally, your cursor is meant to be an assistive tool that is reactive to anything you pan over. If it transforms to an exclamation point, that means you have found something tied to the story that you can either interact with or add to your inventory. It will also turn into directional arrows, so you don't have to play the "Where the Hell is the exit on this screen?" game. In summary, the game isn't without some of the pitfalls of a game copying Myst, but it addresses some of the genre's issues, which makes it more approachable than expected.
Let's Rank Some Puzzles!
Author's Note: Golden Gate is essentially an open-ended game, with Golden Gate giving the power to solve most of its puzzles and sequences in whatever order you see fit. For my purposes, I found a route that allowed me to experience all of its cutscenes and story sequences, while also tackling all its puzzles, including optional ones.
San Francisco
Finding A 1906 Letter - [Rating: 3/10] - I've had a historically hard time conveying the pathing difficulties of Myst-likes in the past. Nonetheless, I will make a valiant attempt to discuss how quest items are spaced in Golden Gate, as that might stand as the most significant impediment for most players. Even when using the fast travel system, some of the spacing and pathing feel egregiously anti-player. For example, after a rival treasure hunter attempts to discourage you from seeking the legendary treasure at the heart of the story, you have the option of exploring the world around you or entering an abandoned building. If you opt to explore the building, the only real part that you can access is a table with a letter dating back to 1906. You acquire this letter by moving Forward-Forward-Left-Forward-Right-Forward-Left and clicking on the letter, dragging it into an inventory slot, and clicking the letter while it is in one of your slots. If you take the time to read the letter, you learn about a bottle on a beach as well as a necklace on a boat named the Balclutha. I warned you that there's a reading requirement to this game, and there's no going around the fact that if you don't take the time to read every document, you're going to get lost and possibly not know how to solve the few puzzles this game has. Getting to this letter isn't the problem; it's the notion that, between its many pages, there are not one, but TWO puzzle solutions within something you could be forgiven for dismissing as flavor text and nothing else, which is why I'm bumping this score up a few points.
However, before fully transitioning into a new puzzle, let's talk about the other subtle puzzle solutions and hints you can find during the game's opening act. After returning to the entrance of the abandoned building, you can move Left-Forward-Left-Forward-Right-Forward-Forward-Right-Forward-Right-Forward-Forward-Left-Forward-Forward-Forward-Left-Forward-Right-Forward-Left to enter San Francisco's Chinatown, and you can come across a specific alleyway that has a building showing a small blue map of the California Bay Area; more on that in a little bit. From this map, you can move Right-Forward-Forward-Left-Forward to walk up San Francisco's Lombard Street, and with each hairpin turn, you find a plaque on the ground with a symbol and word. The plaques display the words "SCIENCE," "ART," and "LETTERS," respectively, and all three feature an owl-like bird. As was the case before, you can expect more details on what this means shortly. Nonetheless, I must give the game some credit in that it recognizes the significant landmarks in San Francisco people likely want to check out and assigns a purpose or meaning to each of them by providing something tangible beyond a fabulous visual tour.
The Bay Area Map Puzzle In The Balclutha - [Rating: 4/10] - So, let's put one of our puzzle hints to use! From Lombard Street, you can move Forward-Forward-Right-Forward-Forward-Forward-Forward-Left-Forward-Right-Forward-Forward-Forward-Left-Forward-Left to enter Hyde St. Pier and the Balclutha mentioned earlier. Inside the boat's deck, you'll find a ship wheel with a jumbled map of the California Bay Area, a map you hopefully saw in that alleyway in Chinatown, as that's the only reference of what the map needs to look like for this puzzle. Without that hint, it's genuinely difficult to know what you're looking at or trying to assemble, and the connection between the blue poster and this specific puzzle is at best unclear. Likewise, like many picture jumble puzzles, you have four inputs to shift the pieces on display, but all handles except the one on the lower right leave one of the three circular sections unchanged. Piecing together the outer portion might not necessarily mean you're closer to solving the entire puzzle because the middle and innermost pieces might be completely jumbled. The most optimal route is clicking the upper-left handle once, followed by the lower-left handle twice, and then the lower-right handle once.
Annoyingly, this is a circular piece shifting puzzle with no reset option. If you find yourself flummoxed or feeling as if you have done yourself dirty, you don't appear to have the option of resetting the puzzle back to its original state unless you have a prior save to load back to before you attempted it. Nonetheless, there are only three circular sections to worry about, so there aren't that many ways to screw yourself over, and even if you do, you can continue to move pieces and possibly brute force the puzzle. When you solve the puzzle, this unlocks a chest which provides a necklace. This necklace unlocks optional cutscenes as you explore the rest of the game and signals you are near "hot spots" with an audio cue.
Finding Alexandra's Diary & Your First Key - [Rating: 4/10] - Either from where you left off or using the fast travel system, your next area of exploration should be Chrissy Field, and as you follow the coastline for a bit, you'll find a circle of trees that you can explore. One of these has carvings, and next to it is a tree you can look down to dig up dirt to pull out a diary for a character named Alexandra, who is connected to one of the cursed individuals tied to the treasure you are hunting. The diary is quite lengthy, but the two parts of it worth noting involve the repeated mention of a "King William of Caledon" and a ship with a figurehead featuring sapphires and emeralds for eyes. Near this dig spot is your first optional cutscene if you have the necklace, which provides additional details about Alexandra's backstory, but what is more important is to walk along the coastline near the trees in hopes of finding a spot where you can look down and see a broken bottle with a key and additional pages to Alexandra's diary. Both the dig spot and the bottle are located far from previous interactables in the game, making it easy to miss them if you don't know what you're looking for. Nonetheless, both the bottle and diary are foreshadowed in earlier texts, and the process of finding them and adding them to your inventory isn't in and of itself arduous.
The Old Mint Magic Square - [Rating: 1/10] - Near where you picked up Alexandra's diary is Fort Point, where you can find a pile of trash containing a brochure with the solution to an upcoming bell puzzle. Next, you'll want to return to Chinatown and migrate to the ruins of the Old Mint. The entrance is locked and can only be opened if you solve a magic square puzzle by rotating blocks to create vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines that all add up to the same number, in this case, fifteen. I find magic squares, mainly 3x3 variants, to be insulting because they feel like one of those "placeholder" puzzles you include in your adventure game, alongside Tower or Hanoi, tangrams, or matchstick puzzles, when you have run out of ideas. For those unaware, all 3x3 magic squares require horizontal, vertical, and diagonal sums of 15, and when you recognize that, figuring out how to solve these puzzles is elementary. What I find downright insulting is that the solution for Golden Gate's magic square is the textbook example of the puzzle as taught in math classrooms. Refer to the Wikipedia page for the concept and note that its default 3x3 puzzle, used for teaching the math behind the puzzle, is identical to the solution for the one in this game.
The Vigilance Committee Bell Puzzle - [Rating: 5/10] - After unlocking the door to the Old Mint, explore the interior of the building until you encounter a bell next to a door. This bell is referenced in the brochure I mentioned earlier. The bell was a tool once used to summon San Francisco's Vigilance Committee, a roving band of vigilantes that acted as a community-led policing force. To open the door next to the bell, you need to play the same tune or tone used to summon the Vigilance Committee, which is a single bell strike, followed by two double bell strikes, and ending with another single bell strike. For your troubles, you receive another key, the purpose of which remains unclear to you. Again, you can find the correct pattern you need to mimic in the brochure you pulled from an easy-to-miss pile of refuse at Fort Point. Nonetheless, there are only four notes to worry about and three possible inputs to choose from (zero strikes, one strike, and two strikes). Solving this by brute force isn't easy, but it's also not impossible. The puzzles associated with the Vigilance Committee are easier to tie to their respective hints because the committee has a seal on everything that mentions them, so tying the threads together here is easier than most situations in Golden Gate. Likewise, when you open the door, you'll enjoy another FMV cutscene as well as documents that show the seal of the Vigilance Committee and make mention of a scepter or staff located in the Cliff House. Which leads us to:
The Jukebox Puzzle - [Rating: 4/10] - Alright, while the documents suggest that you need to go to the Cliff House, you specifically need to find the Mechanical Museum underneath the Cliff House. Fun fact: The Mechanical Museum, also known as Musée Mécanique, still exists, although it has relocated to Fisherman's Wharf. It is one of the better tourist attractions in San Francisco and is worth a visit if you are interested in checking out old mechanical arcade machines from the 1900s to the 1920s. Returning to the puzzle at hand, getting to the museum is one of the more annoying navigational parts of the first half of the game, as even if you use the fast travel system, the closest warp point is Fort Point. Even from there, you'll need to move Left-Forward-Left-Forward-Forward-Left-Forward-Forward-Right-Forward-Forward-Forward-Forward-Right-Forward-Right-Forward. It's a required location, and yet, the game has you searching for a fairly well-hidden ramp that winds around the Cliff House before showing the entrance to the museum. There are a handful of incidental and optional machines you can interact with. Still, the main one you care about is a jukebox, which has three tumblers that you can set to different sorts of Egyptian-inspired art for a variety of animals. What you want to do is put the tumblers to show three hawks that match the symbols you saw walking up Lombard Street. This allows you to remove the jukebox's handle, revealing a magical scepter. Again, getting to this location is the hardest part, but without the context of Lombard Street, it is hard to imagine figuring out what to do here, even if changing the tumbler shapes and symbols isn't tricky in and of itself.
The Jack-In-The-Box Music Puzzle - [Rating: 9/10 or 11/10 if you are tone deaf] - This puzzle is a doozy. Before we get to that, it is CRITICAL that you visit Golden Gate Park at least once and zoom in on the Esperance memorial and take note of the pattern of square-like shapes you see on the statue. Sketch the pattern on a piece of paper or take a photo of it using your phone. Do anything with it other than ignore it, because you do not want to forget that pattern. You can explore a few different sites that are entirely optional, like the Japanese Garden, but eventually, you'll want to return to the abandoned building at the start of the game at Pacific Heights.
After watching a movie sequence upon entering the building, you'll need to find a closet that contains a jack-in-the-box toy that is holding a sheet from Alexandra's diary. However, to get it to open, you'll need to adjust seven sliders to the correct position to play "Pop Goes the Weasel." I found myself humming the tune for each of the sliders and eventually got there, but it certainly took a reasonable amount of time because the pipe for the box is slightly out of tune. For those of you who hate audio-based puzzles or are tone deaf, you're going to want to look up the answers, because there are seven sliders and seven possible positions for each of those sliders, which means the number of possibilities is 7^7 or 823,543. The good news is that the tune is "Pop Goes the Weasel," which isn't a tonally complex harmony. Nevertheless, considering the numerous possible answers and the fact that the audio the toy plays isn't of the highest fidelity, this nearly earns my top marks.
The Tombstone Puzzle - [Rating: 4/10] - The final part of San Francisco you are required to explore is the Mission District, and in this case, Mission Dolores. Reaching that region isn't particularly easy, and the best starting point is Chinatown if you opt to use the fast travel system. But even from there, you're 19 to 20 directional inputs away from the cemetery that has the last required item before you transition to Angel Island. Like the arcade, there are optional tombstones that can be interacted with. However, eventually you'll find one with letters you can manipulate and shift, and it starts with the words "FOLLOW IDLE MANIAC." That sentence is an anagram for "WILLIAM OF CALEDON." Likewise, you also need to adjust the tombstone's dates to reflect William's proper birthdate and deathdate, information that can be found at the start and end of Alexandra's diary pages. Luckily for all involved, the game smartly features a cutscene in which the parish priest expresses exhaustion with the continual interest in William's tombstone, which serves as a sign that the lone puzzle at the cemetery is connected to them. Needing to flip through pages of Alexandra's diary in hopes of reminding yourself when William was born and died is a pain, though, so this isn't entirely a pushover either.
Angel Island
Finding Doctor Holden's Case Book - [Rating: 3/10] - From Fisherman's Wharf, you'll need to track down a ferry from the famous Red and White Fleet, and this boat will take you to Angel Island. It's here, while passing by a ticket booth, that you'll find the lone example of a scanned human NPC the designers and programmers forgot to remove from their photos. Angel Island is immediately smaller than the San Francisco Peninsula. Still, it has depth, and it continues Golden Gate's generally open-ended structure as you can approach its circular loop from one of two possible directions. You can also explore the interior of the island and the buildings on it, in whatever order you see fit, so long as your activities culminate with you unlocking a haunted treasure chest. Starting left is the better option after the game completes its opening cinematic on Angel Island with Jake the treasure hunter. After that, continue moving right and forward until you find a long-abandoned hospital building, which you need to enter to find a cinematic introduction to another would-be treasure hunter from the past, in this case, Doctor Holden.
Following the brief cutscene with Doctor Holden, you'll need to snake up and around the hospital's stairs to find the top floor and turn on an X-ray to see that Holden was smuggling one of the keys to the treasure chest in the body of a cadaver, finally, as you open the drawers on his desk you'll find his case log. If you read it carefully, you'll find a reference to the fact that he hid the key in an artillery battery room on the island. Once again, it's the navigational design that might cause some of you to bristle. I should clarify that Golden Gate doesn't kill you, and there are no ways for you to soft-lock yourself from finishing the game. Likewise, with Angel Island being a much smaller local, the odds of you missing any of the required set pieces are much lower than when you were in San Francisco proper. Nonetheless, the drawer with the final hint on where the key is descends into a pixel hunt, and the fact that your quest now orients around finding three gemstones and three nature-themed keys isn't explicitly stated in the game, and that's a creative choice I don't entirely jive with.
Finding The Final Key & Drussard's Secret Nook - [Rating: 4/10] - It's time to find the Wallace Battery that the doctor's note mentioned! Again, there are a few too many steps for my tastes to get there, and with Angel Island not having its own map with granular fast travel spots, and instead just one singular warp point, you're doing a lot of slideshow navigation. As someone who has walked and biked Angel Island more than once, it's a comforting scenic route, but this set piece has way too many slides that are just there to provide cool visuals, making it feel more like a visual tour rather than a series of locations connected with a tangible goal. When you enter the abandoned battery, which a prior cutscene establishes as the location of your next key to collect, you need to find a stove with a hatch and open it to obtain the leaf key. Paradoxically, the in-game key looks NOTHING like the one in the cutscene, and mechanically, while the game makes it clear what you need to find and collect in the battery, it boils down to yet another pixel hunt. Furthermore, that stove isn't exactly something you'd naturally consider as being its residing spot after viewing the cutscene or consulting the in-game textual resources.
The next significant landmark worth exploring is Mt. Livermore to view a cutscene involving yet another treasure hunter who fell into mania. Still, during their cutscene, you will see them stow away a large mason jar filled with items connected with the main story, the central one being a letter that describes a ruby in the Point Knox lighthouse, which clues you into your second questline: locating three gemstones. This nook is off the beaten path enough that it is tricky to find. The good news is that when you get close, the game has the wherewithal to use a bright light beam effect that extends multiple screens to help guide you. Nonetheless, it's another pixel hunt spread across a multitude of static photos following a pixel hunt that was spread across a multitude of static photos. The gameplay repetition on Angel Island is an order of magnitude worse than when you were walking the streets of San Francisco.
The Shipwreck Statue Puzzle - [Rating: 8/10] - Remember when I made a big deal about noting the square patterns on the memorial statue from a while back? Well, now we're finally going to use it! From where you find Drussard's mason jar, move Right-Forward-Forward-Left-Forward-Left-Forward-Forward-Forward-Forward-Forward-Left-Forward-Forward-Left to face a shipwreck with a figurehead featuring blue and green eyes. That's a fairly lengthy movement sequence, if I do say so myself! Regardless, when you zoom in on the figurehead, you'll find a stone tablet to input patterns, and when you click a small nodule, these patterns translate into flute-like sounds or tunes. When you input and play the correct musical tune, the statue allows you to collect the sapphire and emerald eyes on it.
Now, you either have sketches or photos of the patterns on the Esperance memorial, or you don't. If you don't, your best bet is to fast travel back to it and then back to the starting position at Angel Island. The only complication that got me was that the pattern is presented in a 2x2 grid on the first statue, and you don't know what the starting position is or how to read it. The correct solution is to read it from left to right rather than clockwise, and it also doesn't help that the interface for inputting the patterns is sluggish and unintuitive. On top of that, the feedback the game provides while you are inputting patterns and playing musical notes isn't great, with no indicators to help you figure out what specific notes were wrong or not if you don't play things correctly. To the puzzle's defense, there's only one nearly non-missable visual clue that even remotely connects with this puzzle, but having that hint so thoroughly removed from where you input it is an absolute "dick move."
The Vigilance Committee Seal Puzzle - [Rating: 5/10] - Hopefully, you remember the letter that said a ruby powered the beacon in the Point Knox lighthouse, because that's your "real" last puzzle in the game. When you enter the lighthouse, you find, drum roll please, a sliding block puzzle! It's not your standard sliding block puzzle, as instead of shifting an adjacent block into an empty spot, you click on one to move it to a predetermined location connected or linked to its original position, but it's still a sliding block puzzle. Like the Bay Area Map puzzle on the boat, this is another puzzle that annoyingly doesn't have a reset button. Additionally, the way the different slots interact with each other isn't easy to figure out and requires trial and error, which in itself might make the puzzle even more challenging. Nonetheless, I didn't dedicate a ton of thought to this puzzle and instead started with the top left piece and clicked on it until it looked right, and then moved clockwise, returning to previous pieces that might have gotten screwed up along the way, and found myself arriving at a solution without a ton of frustration. Nevertheless, after consulting a guide, the fewest number of mouse clicks required to solve this puzzle is around 70, which seems completely excessive.
The Beast Treasure Box Puzzle - [Rating: 6/10] - After nabbing the ruby at the lighthouse, you should have three keys and three gemstones. Where you use these is a haunted treasure chest located in a derelict army garrison base on the west side of the island. Once again, the separation between your starting position and end destination is unnecessarily vast, with you needing to move twenty-five to thirty slides just to get to the location of the chest. The chest has two parts, with the first requiring you to place the keys in the correct slots and then the gemstones in the proper order in the chest's innermost compartment before you gain access to a treasure map. The chest is haunted, which means that if you mess up, and this is the closest the game comes to killing you, they place a curse on you, causing your screen to become blurry and monochromatic. The only way to reverse this effect is to load a previous save or use holy water in the church in the Mission District. Ultimately, this is a "gear check" puzzle. All of the requirements needed to solve it have been the lynchpins of the entire game, and all of Golden Gate's plot threads have been converging towards it. You either have what the treasure box needs or you don't, with the added—and what I would deem unnecessary—kicker of punishing you if you try to unlock it without the necessary resources or put things in the wrong order.
Finding The Treasure - [Rating: 2/10] - With a treasure map in your possession, it's time to put Golden Gate to a close. On the map is a sketch of a scepter next to a Horus eye symbol and a pictorial representation of the cave you need to find, and about where it is on the island. It's not a great map and one that makes more sense after you find the cave rather than while you are trying to find it. Luckily, as long as you hug the coastline of Angel Island and follow the beaches when they appear, you'll eventually find a cave that has a Horus eye in front of a stone entrance. All you need to do then is place the scepter in the eye, and after reading a final warning from the person who first found the treasure, the end of the game will commence with nothing else needed from you. I find the ending of Golden Gate a bit anticlimactic, and this simple puzzle is part of the problem. Sure, the game starts with you taking brisk walks throughout the most iconic sections and neighborhoods of San Francisco, so a final walk before it rolls credits is par for the course. Nonetheless, I was hoping for a bit more grit in my adventure game finale.
Should You Play Golden Gate (1997)?
Look, I'm a homer for these sorts of games, and I'll openly admit that. And as a California Bay Area native, there's another element to this game that resonated with me that might not with you. I've seen all the places featured in Golden Gate; some of them I know like the back of my hand, and yet, Golden Gate is a time capsule and love letter to a version of San Francisco that no longer exists. I'm not exactly sure who to credit, but whoever selected the prominent locales in the game was able to capture a good mix of the inner-city charm of San Francisco before it became hyper-gentrified, as well as its seedier parts before they became all-too-familiar headline punchlines about the ills facing the United States. San Francisco wasn't a perfect city in the 90s. However, it was still livable for the average middle-class person, and Golden Gate shows you that slice of the metropolis before it evaporated after the game came out. Fisherman's Warf wasn't a horrible tourist trap, and the Cliff House was still a place to get a decent cup of coffee while hiking the coastline. I'm not just nostalgic for the type of game Golden Gate embodies; I'm also nostalgic for the setting it showcases as part of its narrative scope and sequence.
The heart of the game itself is solid. It understands that what makes Myst special is its intense atmosphere and level design. There are a handful of screens and locations that are entirely optional or only provide incidental tone-setting animations or cinematics, which can become red herrings and are not assistive to the game's story and overall mystery. There are production quibbles to bring up as well. The cutscenes are played through a video player that is way too small, and the FMV acting ranges across a wide gamut. Some of the stylized screens that attempt to be more impressionistic than the standard photos also aren't great and sometimes come across as blurry messes. Too much of the worldbuilding and clues are embedded in newspaper clippings, diary articles, or random posters. While that was genre-appropriate at the time, it's awkward and occasionally an impediment to the game's strengths, which are the vibes. I sound like a teenager, but this game truly is about the vibes, and trust me, they are great.
Some of Golden Gate's puzzles feel more like placeholders than mental challenges or tools for you to learn more about the game's story or underlying mystery. However, the game's title suggests that it's not about the puzzles; it's about putting the city it hopes to showcase front and center, and in that regard, the game is a massive success. In reading this write-up, most of you will have decided if Golden Gate is the type of Myst-like tomfoolery you are willing to partake in. But in writing this blog, even if you decide that Golden Gate does not represent a direction in game design you particularly enjoy, I hope you can see that there is much more to some Myst clones than the fact that they were interactive slideshows or proto-walking simulators. There's a heart to the best of the best, and that's especially true with Golden Gate.