Quantum Conundrum review

Your eccentric elder also likes to treat you as if you're of grade school intelligence, which I suppose makes sense considering the age of the protagonist. However, this assumption that the player is a bit dull offers few opportunities for exploration and discovery. The enjoyment of a puzzle game can be tied to a series of "a-ha!" moments after a period of study. These are the kinds of moments that pump up your ego and energize you to tell everyone about how smart you are. That puzzle was super complicated, but you still managed to figure out how to complete it. Quantum Conundrum has plenty of situations that could have these kinds of moments in them, but your narrator uncle just gives you the answer when you approach the problem. It feels like the game has a built-in spoiler system.

One puzzle in particular — that I don't feel bad about spoiling since the game does it itself — involved going into the fluffy dimension, tossing a safe, going into the slow motion dimension, positioning yourself where the safe will land, and turning back to the fluffy dimension once the safe is close enough to catch. It's a pretty complex solution that would be incredible to solve on your own. The game even plants the seeds for the player to reach this solution by having the narrator mention playing catch with himself during an earlier section of the game. Sadly, the moment you reach the puzzle and start testing, old smarty-brains chimes in with "Remember when I told you about when I played catch with myself? Now might be a time to give it a shot." Thanks, old man. I'll be sure to tell you how Prometheus ends once you escape your pocket dimension.

Another problem that plagues Quantum Conundrum is how it handles failure. Because so many of the puzzles involve jumping from object to object, it becomes very easy to miss a jump and repeat sections of a puzzle room. This isn't inherently awful because the checkpoint system is generous, but all of the dialogue repeats upon a retry. When the puzzles become more complex late in the game and require precise timing, the narration is almost too much to bear. An already annoying uncle becomes a real pest as you near his freedom.

Quantum Conundrum is a fun experience, but it's nothing special. It's a puzzle game with a lot of fun, challenging puzzles but no overarching story or purpose to tie it all together. Despite ideas and characters with a lot of potential, Quantum Conundrum never uses them to its advantage. It is, simply, a puzzle game with fun puzzles. That's not a bad thing, but it winds up feeling like a missed opportunity. It doesn't quite live up to its brother's image.

Quantum Conundrum has some massive shoes to fill. Being the next puzzle game from the mind of Kim Swift, Project Lead on the original Portal, is perhaps the biggest shoes a $15 project could try to step into. In a lot of ways, Quantum Conundrum feels like the smaller, less accomplished brother of Portal. Both games are first-person puzzlers, involve a snarky narrator, lead the player through a series of puzzle chambers, and end with a credits sequence that involves a song written within the game's fiction. The similarities to Portal hurt Quantum Conundrum much like how a younger brother might be hurt by the high standards set by a successful older brother. Portal comparisons aside, Kim Swift's new first-person puzzler still packs a lot of charm.

Quantum Conundrum places you in the role of a scientist's nephew after arriving at your uncle's home. As you enter, an explosion shakes the foundation and your uncle finds himself trapped in a pocket dimension but still able to communicate with you despite the distance. To free your trapped elder, you must travel through three areas of the mansion and restart generators that power the house. Once all three generators are running, your uncle should have enough power to escape his dimensional prison.

While traversing the mansion and solving puzzles, you gain access to four alternate dimensions that affect the properties of objects around you. Is a safe too heavy to pick up? Enter the fluffy dimension where all objects are as soft and light as pillows. A cardboard box is too light to push down a switch? Well, the heavy dimension will make that cardboard as dense as steel. The slow motion and reverse gravity dimensions round out the four powers at your disposal. You'll need to use them all in conjunction with one another to pass many of the puzzles in the mansion while trying to save your uncle.

Mixing dimensions tests the player's dexterity and feels rewarding. A typical puzzle may involve switching to the fluffy dimension to throw an object and then changing the properties mid-air to either send it crashing through a window, block a laser beam, or one of a long list of other environmental interactions. The best puzzles in Quantum Conundrum, though, involve the slow motion dimension and hopping from flying object to flying object while changing their properties to advance through an obstacle course. The sense of chaos and speed while being hurled through the air is fantastic and easily the most fun the game's puzzles have to offer. It probably helps that the objects are almost always household furniture like tables and couches, making the whole process feel a bit insane. Flying through the air on a couch is, perhaps, a once in a lifetime experience.

As you may have been able to tell, the atmosphere in Quantum Conundrum is light-hearted, and often times silly. Upon death, the load screen displays a random entry in a "Things you will never experience" list that includes "falling in love" and "growing old enough to realize you are not special." Shifting dimensions not only changes how all the surrounding objects look and interact, but even affects the decorations. Characters in portraits may start donning a cute bunny costume in the fluffy dimension or metal spikes and face paint in the heavy dimension. The cartoon art style helps make the most absurd aspects of the game feel completely sensical. Your uncle, who narrates your adventure, also does his best to lighten the mood whenever possible. Unfortunately, much like a real life uncle, his jokes aren't always incredibly funny or worth listening to.