Gauge – Game review

Forget far-future super-soldiers, the armies of hell, or even the staggering horsepower of next year’s Ferrari: Gauge puts you in charge of nothing more spectacular than an expanding line, and the results are astonishingly entertaining.

Despite dropping you into the game with practically no direction, the whole thing’s surprisingly easy to pick up. Press your finger against the touchscreen to send your gauge bar moving outwards to the left and right from the centre of the playing field; release your finger and it shrinks back again. Hit the outer edges or the very middle of the screen and you lose a life. Keep it within the scoring zones, however, and you’ll start to rack up points, eventually taking control of a second gauge that expands within the first. Cue fireworks and a series of increasingly bizarre distraction techniques.

The closer you are to the outer edges, the more you’ll score, and – a couple of fairly traditional variant modes aside – that’s pretty much the basics covered. It works, though, because the relationship between your finger and the expanding bar is never, ever in doubt, because the presentation is stylishly stripped back but filled with a weird, mocking humour, and because the design ensures that you’re always teetering on the manic border between victory and defeat.

Gauge, then, is throwaway, minimalist, score-chasing brilliance, a game that’s pulled together from the smallest selection of pieces, but that also feels bold and new and intensely imaginative. After four years of App Store disruption, Kenji Eno’s gloriously slight One-Dot Enemies finally has a worthy companion, and leaderboard hounds have a new source of maddening, rapturous addiction. [9]

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