A first-person puzzler game from indie developers Toxic Games, Q.U.B.E sees you manipulating an environment made of... well, cubes.



Let’s just do it and get it over with: QUBE looks a lot like Portal. From the pristine white of the test environment to the later stages where everything begins to break down and the rusty guts of the chambers are revealed, it’s clear that the game borrows from Valve’s FPS puzzle phenomenon to some extent or another. Fortunately the game’s similarities to Portal are thoroughly irrelevant: the meat of the game is of course its puzzling gameplay, and when it comes to that QUBE is more than compelling enough to stand on its own merits.

Those puzzles center around the manipulation of blocks in the environment, with each chamber having various coloured blocks you need to use to get through. Red blocks are simple: you can pull them out or push them back in, whereas yellow blocks come in a series of three which deploy in a staggered fashion. Blue blocks are bouncy and used as springboards, green blocks must be shuffled around to hit squares, and... confused yet? Wait until you add magnets, rotating rooms, and colour-matching puzzles that require you to roll an intangible ball through various areas to “paint” it the correct colour. Fast reflexes and three dimensional thinking are very much the order of the day.

It’s somewhat hard to explain but very easy to get to grips with, and it’s helped by a very clear but perhaps slightly sterile graphical style. Visually, the game’s simple environments have allowed developers Toxic to polish them to a shine, but it’s still clear that the focus of their work has been on the puzzle design and that’s probably a wise choice. In fact, around Sector 4 or so the game actually goes pitch black and you have to navigate your way around by lighting up one element of the puzzle at a time - so if graphics are your thing, QUBE won’t be the game for you.


Most of the game is spent in ominous silence, with you left alone to ponder your puzzles. Ambient music plays softly in the background, but it’s really a very lonely experience and one that, again, is highly focused on the task at hand. Unfortunately those puzzling tasks do seem to have only one correct solution most of the time, which can be frustrating for those of you who like to improvise. The game’s leaning curve is fairly smooth for the most part, although it pitches steeply at points and there were more than a few occasions where I found myself alt-tabbing out in frustration to come back later. The constant, on-screen presence of my hands often made me feel annoyed that I couldn't just reach out and solve the puzzle with them - which says a lot about what it tells the player to have hands appear on screen.

In many ways, QUBE feels as sterile a game as it looks. It’s a good puzzler and more than worth the $15 it’ll cost you on Steam, but the feeling of clinical, personality-free precision that suffuses it makes each puzzle that does stump you that little bit more difficult to return to. Despite this it still manages to coast along well, and it never feels like a drag over the handful or so of hours it’ll take to power through. If you’re interested in trying out QUBE for yourself before heading to the Steam store, why not grab the demo from our file mirror?

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