Q.U.B.E. (Director's Cut) - Portal Cubed?

Q.U.B.E. (Director's Cut)

I first played a demo of QUBE back in 2010 and had two thoughts, first was "yay! another first person puzzle game like Portal!", the second being "wow, this is really something that stand well on it's own". Jump a year to 2011 and QUBE is released. I quickly bought it and played for about 30 minutes before stopping. It had some issues, both the controls and some technical problems made it more difficult to play than I remember the demo being. And there was no story, narrative, nada - just some connected rooms with puzzles. I put QUBE away and forgot about it.

Cut to four years later and the release of QUBE : Director's Cut. Lots of technical fixes, music and a narrative story have been added. Awesome. Only I didn't want to buy the game again just for those. So again it drifted out of my mind. Then in summer of 2016 Steam notified me that as an owner of QUBE I have been given a copy of the Director's Cut for free (everyone who previously owned it the game got this) and I immediately installed it to play. Then was immediately distracted for 6 months by other games and thank goodness I put it on my play queue for A2Steam because QUBE is great!

Q.U.B.E. stands for - Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion - which describes 90% of the game play mechanics perfectly. You play the game in first person and have 2 fancy Tron gloves, each controlled by your 2 mouse buttons (left and right hand respectively). Pointing and clicking on the colored cubes in the puzzle rooms (made up of white cubes) allows you to manipulate them in prescribed ways that will solve the puzzle for that room - allowing you to move to the next room - often in the early rooms you are literally building your path out of the room.

There are four basic colors to the cubes you play with, red cubes extrude straight out up to 3 times making walls and pillars. Yellow are in sets of 3 which depending on which cube in the set you click on turn into various elevations of graduated steps. Blue cubes depress with one click and then when you (or another object) touches them the cube quickly extrudes tossing you/object into the air. There are also movable green cubes, pink rotator switches, rolling balls and more. The game does a good job of stating you off slow, working you through simpler rooms adding elements in a fairly logical manner.

I really like the stark aesthetics of QUBE. Bright walls with contrasting strong sharp shadows combined with the easy to pick out puzzle cubes make its visually clear. The way the world moves around you in huge chunks does at good job making you feel small inside whatever contraption the game represents. There is a touch of the Cube (the film) feel and a bit of the "padded room" feel (made by the walls of white cubes). It's not claustrophobic but you are consistently reminded by the path you follow that you are deep inside something big. Something very big.

The addition of a full score of music is good. Enjoyable ambient tunes that are not noticeably repetitive when stuck in a room for a long time because you can't figure out the damn puzzle...arrrgg!! Ahem. 

I will quickly touch on the difficulty of QUBE. I have been playing a lot of puzzle games of late and found this one to be much more forgiving than a number of others. This I liked, while some look for really challenging puzzles (the difficulty of such varies depending on your ability to solve them) I prefer puzzles that are more about the process of solving, manipulating the mechanics - rather than banging my head on the wall difficulty.

I was really interested to see what the addition of a story contributed to the game and ended up being fairly pleased. Its all presented as voice over from people communicating with you about the situation you are in and what is expected. Each person has a different point of view and you are build the narrative from the information they provide (trust them or not). I am not going to spoil it but I found the resolution and ending a little rushed and thus unsatisfactory. I would have done it different but I also understand it was written to fit the already existing game levels and length. Overall it was good with some minus points for the ending and no option for subtitles. 

QUBE Director's Cut will set you back about $10 for 5 or so hours of game play. I say it's worth it, even better if you can grab it on sale, for the more unique style of puzzles and presentation it has. The developer is currently working on QUBE2 which I am hoping turns out good.