Q.U.B.E.: Director's Cut

Q.U.B.E.: Director's Cut is yet another Portal without portals. It had a free weekend on Steam, obviously to advertise the release of Q.U.B.E. 2 and knowing how the titles of the genre typically aren't all that long, I decided to quickly play through the game which was developed by Toxic Games and originally released in 2011.

Standard Portal-like

The director's cut version the game is now sold as adds -- among other things -- an all new narrative to the game. As usual with the genre, it struggles with plausibility. It's just really hard to justify huge testing chambers for something as silly as simple puzzles.

Gameplay-wise Qube is from the less hectic end. It's enjoyable but similarly to The Turing Test, there's no high precision requiring fast platforming. You manipulate color-coded cubes of different effects to proceed from one chamber to the next. Activating a green square produces a movable cube while a red square pushes out a pillar up to three cubes length, for instance.

Later on in the game you are able choose which color cubes you want to produce from the activation squares and the puzzles thus get more challenging. They never get too difficult but sometimes I had to actually stop to think instead of brainlessly trying to cycle through every option available.

Some of the puzzles have physics involved and I noticed you don't always get the same results from identical starting conditions. A green cube spawned directly upon a blue launcher cube didn't fly to the same place every time. I think it's a slight of problem if the player misses the correct solution in a puzzle game because its physics decided to act up.

Updated 2019-01-02: Typo fix.