Cubic Lines is a very simple puzzle game that popped out on PlayStation a week or so ago. Its budget price and simple premise drew me in. The premise is to connect all the wires so that the multiple coloured lines are all connected. It is practical logic that you can solve with a little patience.
The game features 50 levels and each level has several squares that you need to pick up and drop into various junctions. They will have coloured wires either bending around corners or a cross where wires cross paths. As these squares aren’t rotatable, the difficulty level of Cubic Lines is quite low and each puzzle can be solved through logic and process of elimination. I ended up tracing the lines with a finger around the screen to work out where wires bend and cross and would then drop the squares in. It was nice to have an abstract looking game that was grounded in simple everyday logic.
Across the levels you’ll move from two colours to three and eventually four but the puzzle difficulty doesn’t get too steep. Instead, its down to how many squares you have to slot in and how many are multiple colours. As soon as the game gets a bit trickier, Cubic Lines starts adding in coloured arrows as hints to give you clues for where to start. Whilst this did help me, it started to make the game a little too easy in the mid game dip. Towards the end of the game, the difficulty picks back up a bit again as you’ll have about 12-15 squares to place.
If I were being picky, one area the game lacks is easy selection controls. Sometimes I wanted to highlight a square hole on a level but the controls struggle to select anything if its not directly on the four main compass points. That meant it was fiddly to get to anything on its own in a corner. I also didn’t spot any colour blind options. On the flipside (literally), aside from chilled music, the way Cubic Lines flips over from level to level like turning pages in a book is really satisfying. It’s such a small detail but I enjoyed it.
So will Cubic Lines change your life? Absolutely not. It is a short but well thought out diversion for a couple of hours. It feels like those £2-3 minimalist puzzle games you get on Steam, but this has gone for the PlayStation market instead. I’m a sucker for them personally and this does the trick for a light, relaxing puzzler.
Review copy provided by developer.
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