Q.U.B.E. 10th Anniversary

It’s Portal with cubes! Not quite, but it’s still a spacial puzzle game in which you are trapped in a bleak lab environment and must puzzle your way to the exit. This tenth anniversary edition adds a story via voice over communications with outside entities. It helps to give some context to the levels, but it’s not really critical to the game.

The main course is the puzzles. The idea here is that there are various colored panels that perform distinct actions: red creates a pillar, yellow a platform/staircase, blue a springboard, and green generates a moveable cube (with magnets! How do they work?). The first dozen or so levels are ridiculously easy. Eventually new twists are added like rotating walls, magnets, guide-able laser beams, rolling objects, and automatons. You slowly build up the skills to manipulate these new elements using those initial four building blocks. By the end, some of the puzzles can get pretty spatially mind-bending. The minimalist story comes to a nice little conclusion that makes it all feel worthwhile.