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POSTED
18/7/12
QUANTUM CONUNDRUM
Square Enix
PS3/PSN (also on Xbox 360/XBLA, PC)
You’re travelling through another dimension – a dimension not only
of sight and sound, but of fluffiness...
Would bells ring if we claimed that this is a first-person puzzler
featuring cubes? Well, probably not unless bellringers are about,
but it may make a light bulb plink above your bonce – should you be
a cartoon character. If you’re a normal – or even abnormal - human
though you might think, “Hmm, sounds a bit like
Portal”.
When described that simply, it does. That one of Portal’s
designy-types was involved probably increases comparisonicity. But
beyond devious, sometimes obtuse and regularly ingenious puzzles
lies a different experience.
You’re the 12-year-old nephew of some professor bloke named Fitz
Quadrangle. Well, in the game. Rocking up to stay a while, you may
stay forever if you can’t nut out how to free your uncle from the
pocket dimension he’s sequestered in. So, you quest about his
mansion, solving puzzles usually involving cubes to get power
generators firing again which, apparently, may help.
You start in your dimension, but soon another quadrilogy open up,
which you can flippity-flop between with quick button stabbity-stabs.
They’re all in the same space, but they’ve different properties.
There’s heavy, which mercifully isn’t full of hippies, slow-mo,
reverse gravity and the most strokenificent of all, fluffy. They’re
quite self-explanatory, but as an example, a cardboard box in the
normal dimension’s a cardboard box. Go ‘heavy’ and it’s suddenly
heftniferous, whereas in ‘fluffy’ it’s a bastion of lightness.
You’ll flit between them to riddle-unravel.
The puzzling’s fantastic. Quibbles? Sadly the first-personisticity
is generally shitful. Anything involving platformesque movement will
frequently elicit more expletives than heard at a Q*Bert family
reunion. An alternative third-person option would’ve been peachy.
Our mangled DualShock concurs.
Still, despite regular frustration-induction, there’s something
unquantifiable about Quantum Conundrum that consistently
drags you back for more. MMMmmm... Fluffy!
  
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