QUBE: 10th Anniversary has been rebuilt from the ground up
Even with all those extra flourishes, though, the Director’s Cut was still the same QUBE puzzles from before, leading many to write off the update yet again as a slight improvement on the original, but nothing to get too excited about. Now, QUBE is getting a fancy10th Anniversary Editionthat rebuilds both versions of the game from the ground up, while also adding an entirely new sector that doubles the length of the game. And I’m telling you: please don’t write off QUBE for the third time in its life. It deserves better than that.
I will hold my hand up now and say I’m probably too stupid to really get the benefit of Sector 8. The dogged completionist in me that never likes to leave games unfinished will probably still keep plugging away at it here and there, but even if, like me, Sector 8 ends up being a complete non-starter for you, man alive, you can’t deny the rest of it has had a pretty incredible glow-up. Those flat, stark white walls now have a ridged, coarse texture to them, jutting out at odd heights and angles, and the colour, oh my, the colour. Entrances and archways are now slathered in an eye-catching orange and cool mint green, casting my mind back to the Victorian-style swimming pools I spent so much time in as a kid.
This newfound splash of colour doesn’t overshadow or detract from the key puzzle blocks either, as these have now been given an extra glossy, ray traced sheen that instantly makes them stand out from the surrounding sea of background tiles. They still retain their hard, angular edges, too, and pushing and pulling them out of these knobbly chamber walls with your magic gloves somehow feels more tactile than ever before, like you’re clicking together a slightly broken Rubix cube made out of Lego and hammering it back into shape.
The 10th Anniversary edition is out on September 14th onSteam, but based on an early preview build I’ve been tinkering about, it’s almost like I’m playing a completely different game. Yes, the puzzles are pretty much identical versions of what came before, but many have received subtle shifts, tweaks and changes. Rotating puzzles now have horrible laser bins you’ll need to avoid, and heck, later levels now give you a choice of where to lay down certain colour blocks where they didn’t previously. I know this, as I’ve literally spent the last week playing all three versions of QUBE back to back, and let me tell you, the 10th Anniversary edition has more rug-pulls than you’d expect.
That’s kind of what’s so exciting about this particular QUBE outing. Despite having solved every puzzle twice over in the days preceding it, the 10th Anniversary edition sheds new light on almost every single one of them. And you know what? I almost prefer it without the Director’s Cut story mode now, too. It’s funny, playing the two of them in such close proximity and seeing all the elongated walking sections and long lift rides that have been added to make sure you’ve really got time to listen and absorb what’s being said over the radio to you, and in hindsight I could almost do without it, you know? Just let me get to those great puzzles.
That said, I do also appreciate the developers including PixelPopper’s close-reading analysis of QUBE: Director’s Cut as well, which can be found in the 10th Anniversary extras section (as well asonline). I do enjoy long-reads like this from time to time and the author (who’s also a sometime commenter here at RPS - hello!) puts forward an interesting case about exactly what it was doing in response to Portal and its first-person puzzle contemporaries, and why it’s deserving of a more modern reappraisal.
