Gato Roboto is a tricky little Metroidvania, but the elevator section seems to go on forever. Here’s how you complete it.
In our review of Gato Roboto, we praised Doinksoft’s game for quality of life improvements that make it more user-friendly than most Metroidvania games. While the boss battles are still difficult, we felt that better signposting and more generous save points make the game a fair kind of difficult, not just punitive and mean.
There is one bit, however, where the signposting goes awry and it can be hard to figure out how to progress.
After you’ve completed the three challenges for the laboratory computer and unlocked the main elevator, Gato Roboto sends you down the elevator and into the lab to the endgame. It even warns you that this is the point of no return, in case you need to go back and unlock any secrets.
You get prepared for a boss fight, step on the elevator, and – well, the elevator is the challenge.
Instead of fighting against the ever-shifting attack patterns of a large, multi-armed, mech-piloting mouse, it’s just an elevator. But it’s an elevator full of enemies. You’ll find yourself up against wave after wave of baddies, dropping from above. The goal appears to be to just survive to the end.
As you survive, and the attack patterns change, you’ll see – in the mech’s HUD at the top of the screen – your Y position will change. Flip to the map and you’ll see Kiki’s progress down the lift shaft from top to bottom.
But after a few different attack patterns, you’ll find your vertical progress halts, even though the elevator appears to continue heading down. You’ll be trying to survive against wave after wave of enemies, wondering if you’ll ever get to the end, but the end won’t come on its own.
Up to this point, just surviving has been the aim of the game. Yes, clearing the enemies from the elevator has been part of that, but you can count the number of enemy waves before the pattern changes. Suddenly, the pattern doesn’t change. You’re just stuck in a loop, of enemies and projectiles, until you run out of luck and run out of life.
Here’s where the elevator game changes. Instead of just surviving the wave, you need to take out all the enemies to continue. Specifically, there are two turret-like enemies, cut into ledges in the lift shaft, that you also need to defeat. You can easily get away with not killing these guys – they don’t threaten you if you stay on the deck of the lift – but until you do, the elevator ride won’t come to an end.
They’re persistent, too: if you kill the one on the right-hand side of the screen, it won’t be replaced. This is your only clue that these turret enemies are key to completing the elevator ride. Kill them both? The elevator section soon comes to an end, and you’ll be able to progress to Gato Roboto’s final boss.
We won’t tell you how long we spent in Gato Roboto’s elevator shaft before we figured out that you needed to kill those two specific enemies. It’s a little embarrassing. But you also might be impressed with how many waves we survived before we figured it out. (It’s in the hundreds.)
