![]() The balls have curiously unsatisfying properties that don't seem to reflect the shape: they stick to walls, wobble at strange moments, and sometimes gravitate towards their destination in a manner reminiscent of crazy golf. ![]() But the deliberately weird physics undercut everything. Many are beautifully arranged, with elegant solutions you'll only stumble across after much clumsy fiddling, and demand multitasking under pressure. These slope puzzles show the best and worst of QUBE. Your glove nodes glow with the colour of the block they're aiming at, a neat and useful effect. As the game hits its stride, slopes are introduced alongside glowing green spheres and many later puzzles are built around buffeting the ball in the right way as it descends: knocking it to the side, 'catching' it with a block, guiding it towards a hole. There are puzzles that work like miniature mazes, where you're prodding a ball back and forth beneath your feet until it slots into the right spot, or great room-spanning layouts that have to be reconfigured completely to escape. It feels like you're controlling things at one remove, and even when the setups incorporate giant spring-boosted jumps or mid-air block-surfing there's little physical feedback from your avatar's actions.ĭespite that, QUBE wrings enough ideas from its basics to keep your interest, and regularly adds more tools - magnets, lasers, power wires, pulleys. In contrast QUBE's central mechanic is a hand pointing at blocks which then move, or pointing at magnets, or pointing to turn a lens. I don't think Portal's challenging until the latter stages either, but the difference there is the fun inherent in using portals even when you're solving a relatively simple challenge, the way you're doing it is a little thrill every time. The first hour or so of QUBE combines these into larger multi-part puzzles, but this is a sedate stroll rather than a challenge. The game's first stretch is made up of reds, yellows and blues - simple puzzles where you pull out reds to build ramps up to a ledge, work out how to make the yellows emerge in the right pattern, and bounce off springs towards newly-made footholds. Magnets turn up later which you use to move cubes around - like the spheres, QUBE's cubes have highly suspect physical properties. Puzzles are built around coloured bricks that react in different ways to a wave of your glove: red ones pull out in a straight line, yellows are in groups of three that pop out to different lengths depending on where they're hit, blues act like springs, and purples spin sections of the walls. The floors and walls of its small rooms are composed from large grey and white tiles, the interactive elements are colour-coded, and the larger structure funnels you through increasingly complex arrangements of blocks and jumps. You wake in a lab, a silent protagonist wearing high-tech gloves. Every moment feels intruded upon (Gabe, call me!), and the comparison does QUBE's own mechanics no favours. The problem is not that Toxic Games wants to be hired by Valve - that is a noble and understandable aim, and by the way Gabe Newell if you're reading I'm available - but that QUBE's is visually a poor imitation of Portal, and so your frame of reference for its decent FPS puzzling is the best FPS puzzler ever. ![]() The game doesn't share a great deal of its mechanics or ideas, but the influence is absolutely overbearing, to the extent this almost plays like a pitch document. The aesthetic design of QUBE is far too inspired by Portal. ![]() Doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, does it? But QUBE is more elegant than its name suggests, a slow-paced and methodical first-person puzzler that only suffers from an obvious comparison - one that, unfortunately, it forces on the player again and again. QUBE means 'Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion'. ![]()
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