VIDEO GAME: Q.U.B.E. 2 (2018)

Q.U.B.E. 2
Year: 2018
Rating: T
Time Played: ~5 hours

Q.U.B.E. 2 is one of those random games that I decided to play on a whim. Fortunately, it was free to me as a perk of having Amazon Prime. After completing this game, I don’t think I would have paid for it otherwise. I knew nothing about this game going in, but it was at least interesting enough for me to see it all the way through to the end. That being said, it’s a bit derivative of other first-person physics puzzle games that came before it.

The more first-person physics puzzle games I play, the more I realize that Portal 2 is the definitive game in this genre. This is mostly because other games tend to rip off on Portal 2, and Q.U.B.E. 2 is one of these ripoffs. While Q.U.B.E. 2 takes itself seriously in the narrative it runs through the game (as compared to Portal 2‘s occasional humor), the stakes never seem to match the vibe the game is trying to produce. Perhaps it’s trying to be brooding like Control, but the fact that it’s just a physics puzzle game means that its goal is to just string together a series of puzzles until the end of the game.

In terms of difficulty, Q.U.B.E. 2‘s puzzles were never too hard to complete. A few definitely required me to perform a few attempts before figuring out the gimmick, but then that gimmick would be re-used at least four more times. If anything, the repetitive nature of the puzzles is what wore on me after a while, even if the environment changed a few times during the gameplay. The fact that I kept having to “unlock” the next area by completing a quartet of different puzzles was boring after the third or fourth area.

A generic physics puzzler that takes itself too seriously, I give Q.U.B.E. 2 3.0 stars out of 5.