Building Bridges Is Hard, a Story in 5 GIFs

There's a long tradition of video games about the not so simple task of building bridges. Whether you were ordering poor little Lemmings into the abyss on your Amiga, helping elephants across chasms in Elefunk on your PlayStation 3, or building wobbly structures in World of Goo on your PC, you already understand Poly Bridge's appeal.

Building even a simplified version of a bridge is hard, and it's hilarious to see what a terrible engineer you'd make when it inevitably collapses and people fall to their doom.

Every one of Poly Bridge's 60 levels has the same goal. You must build a bridge over a river, allowing a variety of vehicles, some heavier than others, reach the other side. The difference is in the materials you're given to work with (road, wood, steel beams, support cables, hydraulics, and so on), the anchor points, and the budget you're working with.

Drag and drop these around a grid, press shift when you think you're ready, and cross your fingers.

You're going to fail, a lot, but Poly Bridge's brilliant addition to the bridges-are-hard genre is that you can instantly transform each of your failures into a .gif and share it on Twitter by linking your account to the game.

It might not sound like much, but the ability to celebrate your idiocy, showing how you've dropped a Volkswagen bus right into the soup makes all the difference.

Behold, my many failures:

You can find an entire gallery of equally awful engineering on the game's website, or you can search for #PolyBridge#PolyBridge on Twitter.

Poly Bridge was developed by Dry Cactus. It was released on Steam Early Access today for $12.