What happened? You wake up from unconciousness in a sterile white environment wearing a new kind of space suit. With no memories left you get the feeling of being a test object inside a giant structure made of cubes and need to find your way out.

Your suit has a few strange abilities you will discover on your journey. The one you start with is the ability to pull and push colored blocks to make stairs or bridges and to activate switches from a distance, like a Jedi force. As the white block walls sweep aside to reveal a hallway you get into control and the first easy block puzzles appear to make a nice subtle tutorial.


As your suit is also equipped to receive calls from the outside an intriguing story kicks in. The voice actors did a very good job, but on a technical side it's a whole different thing: First, there is a sound bug that terminates all sound coming from the tv speakers. This glitch happened several times throughout the game and was a real annoyance, especially when speaking of a game labeled "Director's Cut". It really detracted from the overall immersion and atmosphere. Another more minor sound bug is that some sound effects, like when pushing or pulling objects just skip and mute all the time.

Having that out of the way, you feel the love of detail that has been spent on creating the 3D environment and (mostly-physics based) puzzles and the overall aesthetics and feel of the place you are in. The game keeps being exciting as new interesting gameplay elements are introduced. Subtle changes in the environment shake things up quite a bit. Thumbs up for the artists. Also, the difficulty curve is perfect, saving the hardest challenges for the end.  


The puzzles are presented to you in a linear way, so there's generally not much room for exploration. You can find secret areas if you check suspicious walls but these are a few. Every time you enter a new puzzle room the walls close behind you and there's no way back. No backtracking ever. It's the same for going forward: There won't be a new passageway opening  until you clear the room you are in. If you can't solve a puzzle you are stuck. In the later sectors the game throws some mindblowing things at you, but it's worth it for the other puzzles that are  interesting and fun. But again, it's not without a few flaws. Those started to happen around the end of the game. In one puzzle the physics glitched around and made the puzzle harder and sometimes impossible to beat, requiring a reset. Another puzzle got me stuck in a wall so I was able to take an unintended shortcut and skip a room without solving it. Again, things like this should not happen in a game with "Director's Cut" in its title. It's a label of quality, so what a director is it to let this pass?

What is essentially a well-made game is marred by frequent irritating bugs and a somewhat unpolished appearance. Furthermore it's missing its full potentital as a Wii U title. It would be a fantastic game if you could control it with motion controls, or even the Wiimote, but you are restricted to analog stick controls. Missing these important features the Wii U version feels as slow as all the other console versions and not as nice as the PC version. The only use the GamePad has is mirroring the tv screen, so at least you have Off-TV-Play. Another little thing some would expect from a Director's Cut title on Wii U is full HD graphics, but Q.U.B.E. runs only in 720p, not 1080p.



Content-wise you get a story mode that lasts around 6-8 hours depending on your puzzle solving skills, but also a new "Against the Qlock" mode that wasn't present in the original release. In this mode you hunt for best times and medals in 10+ stages. There's a timer running now, and power-ups that enhance your speed or jumping ability temporarily or give you a some extra seconds can be collected. Needless to say you need to get to the target zone as fast as possible. It's a frantic distraction from the relaxing story mode and adds some playtime.

All said and done, Q.U.B.E. is a fairly unique and interesting 3D puzzler for a low price, but an update is in order to fulfil the potential of this experience.

SKTTRSKORE: 7/10  

SKTTR, written on 24. September 2015