Quantum Conundrum review

This game has several similarities with Portal, in fact both come from the mind of the designer(Kim Swift) as and such you will be spending your time going from room to room surpassing challenges as they come.

In this game you take the role of a kid visiting his uncle, a genius Professor named Fitz Quadwrangle who has turned his mansion into a huge laboratory, on arrival you find that as usual something went wrong and you are now stuck in the mansion.

One thing my geeky side finds very entertaining is that Quadwrangle, who acts as a narrator/guide in a similar manner to Glados in Portal is voiced by John de Lancie, who will be easily recognized by anyone who enjoyed watching Start Trek as Q, which is also in that series related to the quantum phenomena, so has you can imagine every time Professor Quadwrangle spoke I was literally imagining Q saying those words which added to the enjoyment of the game.

The mechanic of the game revolves around using dimensions who change the properties of the world in order to overcome the challenges. These four dimensions are the fluffy(objects becomes lighter), heavy(objects becomes heavier and can resist lasers), slow and reverse gravity dimensions, they change the physics of all objects and can only be used one at the time. Initially you have little control over the dimensions them selves and its usually one or two at the same time, but as the game progresses you will start using more dimensions.

While the concept of the game is interesting and fun, I found the puzzles them selves to be boring as my brain was craving for some hard challenges, mainly because the narrator usually tips you in how to overcome the problem reducing that feeling we get after achieving something difficult, making most part of the game feel almost like a big tutorial.

Like all puzzle type games there is little re-playability value, unless you like to try doing the same puzzles against the clock or/and in this case with less dimension switching, but then it no longer becomes a mental exercise and its all about reflexes and luck.

In the end regardless of what I felts about the challenges the game was fun, and when you look at the price of the game its definitely worth the cost, so far two DLC(downloadable content) have already been announced for this summer meaning puzzles will no doubt become more interesting from now on.

2 comments:

Magnum said...

This looks interesting - a bit like a puzzle game with some action parts included. Also: thanks for reminding me I haven't played either part of Portal - yet!

Vague Raconteur said...

I think people who bought this really bought this because they hoped it was similar to Portal, but it's just not similar enough. :(

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