The Indie Fund finally bears fruit, and the art-style looks almost festive on this one; A sea of white with primary-colored highlights awaits in Q.U.B.E. (Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion), a first-person puzzle game clearly inspired by Portal, but thankfully doing enough different to stand proudly by itself. A full review will have to wait until I’ve dug a little deeper and shaken the cobwebs out of my brain, but here’s some thoughts on the first couple of levels, along with a trailer after the break.

While it would be so easy to just copy the Portal formula and end up shoehorning itself into the now-familiar ‘antagonistic narrator’ framework, Q.U.B.E. immediately tries something different. There is no introduction. There is no tutorial. There’s no narrator, or on-screen instructions. All you know is that you’ve started out face-down on the floor in a building made out of strange white cubes, and have a fancy pair of glowing gloves on. These gloves change color when you focus on the occasional colored blocks, and clicking the left or right mouse buttons interacts with them.

And so begins and ends the limits of your interaction with the environment. You run around in first-person, can jump to exactly one block in height, and interact with the colored cubes. Red ones can extend out from their position up to three blocks in length by left-clicking. Right-clicking retracts them back. Blue blocks start extended. Retract them into the ground or walls, and they become jump-pads. Yellow blocks come in threes. The block you click on extends to three blocks in length, the adjacent one, two, and the second adjacent (if you clicked on the left or right-most block) one. Instant staircase. These are just the basics, but you get the idea.

The levels, at least so far, seem perfectly paced. No tutorial text is needed – good, as you’re not getting any. Each new block is introduced by itself, allowing you to figure out how it works in a safe, unhurried space. Each successive room presents a larger and more complicated puzzle involving it, with new wrinkles being added to the situations as you work your way through the chambers. As puzzles get more complicated, reset buttons appear on the walls, allowing you to back out of unwinnable situations, too. With no HUD to guide you, the only indication you’re given of progress is the occasional end-of-level chamber with a series of lit blocks, indicating your progress through the game.

It’s pointedly minimalist, at least so far, and it works very well, doing a lot with a relatively limited palette of environmental elements. The trailer suggests that the chambers become a little less orderly and controlled later on, but that’s something to look forward to. As you can see from the screenshots, the rooms are simple yet aesthetically pleasing, making good use of the Unreal engine and it’s various lighting technologies. Certain rooms reconfigure themselves around you in a manner very similar to Portal 2 – an impressive and slightly menacing effect, mainly as the chambers in Q.U.B.E. are already smaller and more claustrophobic than their Aperture Science equivalents.

Q.U.B.E. is currently available via Desura and Playism, with the Steam release coming ‘very soon’ – they’re just hammering out some final details with Valve, apparently. The game costs a quite fairly calculated £9.99 / $14.99. Expect a full review soon.

[Q.U.B.E., Indie Fund]

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