Zadzooks: Q.U.B.E: Director’s Cut review

A gamer attempts to escape a massive space object while saving earth in the puzzling Q.U.B.E: Director’s Cut (Grip Games and Toxic Games, Rated Everyone, reviewed with Xbox One, $9.99).

Q.U.B.E. stands for Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion, and it is a mandatory skill in solving a gantlet of challenges surrounding the manipulation of cubes, switches and balls to work through six sectors of an ever-changing environment.

Through a first-person perspective, the player finds himself as a recently awoken astronaut suffering from memory loss but apparently alone on a complex object on a collision course with earth.

The sci-fi thriller heats up through a female resident from the International Space Station slowly giving the player information on his life (when her radio is in range) as well as a distressed male voice passionately telling him to not trust her.

The player moves through a series of shifting corridors and ascending and descending shafts made up of blocks and into rooms where he solves puzzles and conquers mazes using high-tech gloves.

Amidst very sterile, monochromatic settings, the colorful cubes stand out and are used to manipulate the area.

For example, red blocks in a wall can extend in and out to multi-sized rectangular blocks. A trio of yellow embedded blocks in walls and floors open up as a stepladder in multiple directions depending on the initial block chosen. Push blue cubes into a wall, floor or ceiling that act as a springboard when stepped on.

Color-changing orbs eventually get tossed into the mix. They create a more complex labyrinth-type challenge as parts of walls must be rotated to position the orbs to roll over cubes and change colors before they are deposited in translucent vats matching the hue and opening new areas.

Equally tempting is a later sector featuring near pitch-black areas slightly illuminated with white wall squares. Now, the colorful cubes are hidden and must be lit up with switches to begin solving a conundrum and find the escape route.

Suffice to report, the game mechanics, atmosphere and voice-over work are superb.

The gloved hand’s fingertips glow as they get near the same colored cube while the DualShock 4 controller rumbles when cubes are manipulated. Also, the white-cubed rooms undulate as they transform and are mesmerizing to watch.

It kind of reminded me of the innards of the shifting pyramid in the “Alien vs. Predator” film.

What’s crushing is the game only lasts about two hours, and I could have easily appreciated the action and active locations for many more.

However, astute players will find an occasional secret room that really drains the brain. Take the case in sector four and an area featuring a colored-glass window and Rubik’s colored pressure plate on the floor.

A player must figure out how to open a wall to expose a multicolored window. He looks through the window and into a room and must now manipulate the blocks and wall space from the outside of the room (through the window) to align a group of multicolored pillars in the right sequence to match the pressure plate design.

Solving this beauty offered a real rush of accomplishment.

Additionally, the “Against The Qlock” mode is available that tosses in another 10 levels that use picking up powerups and using similar colored cubes and solving techniques from the story to try and frenetically work through the courses in record times to boast to friends online.

Overall, break out the logic, spatial relationship skills and speedy reactions for the dazzling “Q.U.B.E: Director’s Cut.” It won’t disappoint any puzzle fan in the family.