Q.U.B.E.

So I beat Q.U.B.E. today.

It was fine.

...

Right, so that's not enough for a whole post.

QUBE (forget the periods) is a Portal-like puzzle game, but instead of portals you get to move little cubes around with magic gloves. The different cubes do different things, like throw you across a room or raise to different heights. It's an alright puzzle game, with some pretty neat arrangements of ideas.

It's also Portal-like in that you start in a mostly white clinical setting, and halfway through the game everything falls apart to reveal the machinery behind it all. Except QUBE is not nearly as clever as Portal.

I've been pondering why it's not nearly as clever, and it's hard to get at. All the pieces are there: interesting physical puzzles, mysterious setting, cubes. But it feels very contrived in a way that Portal did not.

Here's my theory: Portal is a naturally subversive game, whereas QUBE is not.

Portal hands you a gun that links two spaces in a physically impossible yet completely intuitive way. It's something that you could take into the real world and cause havoc with. It's a subversion of the way we think about physical space.

QUBE gives you gloves that move designated cubes in designated ways. QUBE gloves in the real world do nothing, because there is no real world analogy.

On top of that, Portal places you into a game within a game. GLADOS is playing with you, and you are engaging her directly by moving through the world. It's the relationship of player and designer made transparent. When the scenery falls away in Portal, the game within a game falls away as well. Now you're defying GLADOS, which feels like you're defying the designer (you're actually not, but we all know that. Just roll with it). It subverts the player/designer relationship.

The design in these latter stages of Portal reflect this by dropping all the obvious signs pointing you towards a solution. Now you are exploiting the environment rather than going through GLADOS' prescribed steps. It's a revelation that brings the portal gun one step closer to being real in your mind.

When the scenery in QUBE falls away, nothing changes. The puzzles are still obviously designed (with loving care) by a person. They have obviously prescribed solutions with very clean and precise steps.

So why even make the scenery change if it has no impact thematically or mechanically?

Because Portal did it.

It's frustrating that QUBE, a game that could stand on its own, chose to take so directly from Portal. It could have had its own strong themes, or its own subversions, or it could have just stood as a strong puzzle game. But the comparisons are so direct and obvious, that QUBE looks like a weak imitator of Portal.

There is a Director's cut edition of QUBE that adds a bunch of narration. I listened to a bit of this and, and it's about two people telling you conflicting things about what you're doing and why. One of them is a liar, one of them is telling the truth. Everything else appears to be the same. Again, this feels like a reflection of Portal, but not nearly as substantial and divorced from the game itself.

So that's QUBE. The puzzles are clever, the game is short (this is a good thing), and it reminds me of Portal too much to be enjoyable.