https://store.steampowered.com/app/359100/QUBE_2/
Just finished this excellent game. It almost scratches my itch for a Portal sequel, with a lot of the same elements--scifi theme, awe-inspiring 3D rooms, and clever puzzles.
From a DROD player's perspective, the puzzles are maybe medium difficulty. To be fair, about half of the difficulty comes from scoping out the space well enough to understand what is possible, and a few tricky movements thrown in. But this aspect was enjoyable to me too. Nothing required much in the way of reflexes.
There are some honest puzzles here, some of the lynchpin variety. The designer has a satisfying tendency to reuse the same mechanism in a room multiple times for different parts of the same puzzle. And the elements are fun in an visceral way as well as mental, e.g. you can make giant structures rotate around or a metal ball fly across the room.
The story... meh. It feels a little tacked on. Something about misunderstood aliens. Although, I think it might have been better than I'm giving it credit for, but I just got bored of listening to the same 3 characters saying the same kind of thing in the same way from one scene to the next. It's basically:
Main Character Lady: I can't remember everything. I feel strongly about things I don't understand yet.
Speaker Lady: Concentrate on your mission, we don't have time for that crap. You need to connect up some generators to power a central shaft thing allowing you to access to...
Alien Voice Guy:We want to explain and share so much with you. It will take several hours of droning robo-alien talk.
The voice acting was good. Hmm, and even the writing was decent. I think the things that could happen in the story were probably constrained severely by the game's budget, so ended up being too repetitive. I can almost see that project's Gantt chart, with a tidy little story being worked on in parallel with game development, minimal coordination needed due to its simplicity. Too bad--a lot of the elements for a good story experience were there. Here's hoping somebody gives Q.U.B.E. 3 a massive budget.
Cool game. Fun to play.
-Erik
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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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