The Cubes is one of those unassuming puzzles that sneak onto Steam or Itch without fanfare. Its screenshots may not convey the head-scratching that will ensue, but hidden beneath its garish or minimalist exterior lies a well-crafted puzzle. The Cubes is all about spatial awareness, and its clever hook will make you feel very brainy when it clicks.
Every level features four playing areas, each with a cube of six differently coloured sides. The goal is to collect the coins scattered across the four playing areas, but they’ll all be placed in awkward locations, blocked by spikey traps. To gain access to the coins, you’ll need to open and close various spike traps by rolling the right cube onto a matching coloured pressure pad. In its simplest form, a blue pressure pad in area 1 will unlock a spike trap in area 2, allowing block 2 to pass the trap and collect the coin. The same applies for areas 3 and 4. Of course, that’s exactly how the opening level works, and there are 50 in The Cubes.
Each set of 10 levels adds more coins into the mix. The spike arrangements get narrower and more complex, meaning that the space available to roll around your cube to get the right colour in the right place becomes a luxury. To help players navigate this tricky design, your cube is unwrapped in the centre of the screen like an unfolded origami piece. This lets players see what colours are placed where, and you can always see which colour is on the floor, too. As levels increase in complexity, more traps, more pressure pads, more spaghetti crossovers of playing areas, and more opportunities to fail are introduced. Fundamentally, no more game mechanics are added, but across the 50 levels, you’ll have a harder time working out the order to unpick things. It is like a cube rolling padlock puzzle in some ways, and finishing the later levels feels rewarding.
The Cubes is a little garish to look at. You can’t zoom in, and colours do get a bit lost in the visual noise of the monochrome playing area grids. I also ran into a few technical hiccups, one of which completely froze my PC, requiring a complete restart. I do wish there was an undo button, too. It’s a fairly standard quality-of-life feature, but it is missing here. In many ways, The Cubes feels like a student project gone public. That is both a compliment and a curse depending on how you feel about scrappy projects that do one thing well, but lack polish or finesse. This is a strong 6.5/10 from a puzzle perspective, but be aware, you’ll need to wrestle the game into submission sometimes!
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