Sunday 1 July 2012

Quantum Conundrum

The past few days I've been sinking time (upwards of 10 hours!) into playing an extremely new game: Quantum Conundrum.

It's a first person puzzle game involving strange physics, and a disembodied voice leading you on. Yes, okay, let's get it out of the way: it's reminiscent of Portal. But then, so are so many other first person physics games. It would be hard to create one that isn't reminding people of Portal, and many people have said other non-first person physics games remind them of Portal, so... where does it end? Okay, one of the people designing this game also designed Portal, but...

In this game, you have a device that changes the physics of the world to being fluffy (aka everything is light), heavy, slow motion or anti-gravity. Very much or. There are many levels where you need to quickly switch from one to the other and getting your fingers to the controls in time can be very tricky (certainly it proved very frustrating for my brain to try to get around it). And by the way, if you watch people playing, if you see them often switching to the fluffy dimension when they don't want to... that's because they are hitting the E key as the Use key. Did that a lot too.

(And I'm sure there are videos of people playing this. And completing this. And getting speed runs. And people will have all the achievements already and everything... you know what, some of us aren't hard core and have to work and such...)

Anyway, I finally made my way through the story mode, and got to the ending. However... the very last note of the game is odd... is that the bad ending or something? And if I go back to 'continue' game, do I lose all the collectibles or something? I don't know... I could try, but...

And this is the problem. Having completed the basic story... I'm not eager to jump back in and play more. Maybe I need more of a break? I brough the season pass, so I'm getting the DLC, but I can't say that I'm wanting to play it...

Maybe it was too much of a slog in places? (Some places were excessively 'make a little progress, then do the next section over and over and over again'... hitting bits of the geometry could easily screw things over that you have to start over. And because of the collision detection being fernickity, I wasn't always sure what I did that caused me to die. That was not fun.) Maybe I should have waited until I saw more of it? Maybe the game wasn't really for me?

It should have been. Yet... having completed it, all I can say is "...meh...".

[END]

2 comments:

evildicemonkey said...

Did you say "Rip off of portal"?
...
No?
...
Oh well, here's one anyway
http://www.kongregate.com/games/Heaval/portalizer

Jamas Enright said...

Wow, I don't know if Valve should hire these guys or sue them...