Quantum Conundrum

The video game industry is dominated by space marines, regular marines, super-soldiers, and zombie-killers?the headshots and gun-blasts permeate the business. That's why it's particularly nice to see a clever title like Airtight Games and Square Enix's Quantum Conundrum ($14.99, PC), the latest project from Portal designer Kim Swift. The first-person puzzle game focuses on solving increasingly challenging puzzles using a dimension-shifting tool within a mansion filled with wacky inventions. This review is of the PC version, but the game will also be available on PSN and XBLA.

Blinded by Science
Quantum Conundrum puts players in the role of a 12-year-old boy who visits his eccentric scientist uncle?Fitz Quadwrangle (voiced by nerd icon John de Lancie)?only to discover that the nutty professor is missing in action after an explosion in his mansion. Although the condescending professor is nowhere to be seen, he's heard; he provides the back story and clues, and leads you to the Inter-Dimensional Shift (IDS) glove that you need to solve the mansion's many challenges. The mission is to discover the missing scientist, who's trapped in what he describes as "limbo."

Although Quantum Conundrum is billed as an inter-dimensional puzzle game, it has ties with old school point-and-click adventure games in which you're given limited clues to solve a problem by interacting with objects in the environment. You begin by pushing buttons and pulling levers of Quadwrangle's many Rube Goldberg-like machines to open locked doors, but quickly graduate to the IDS?your main tool in Quantum Conundrum. The glove lets you shift between dimensions to manipulate items in a way that you could not in the normal, default dimension. That's when the fun begins.

Weird Science
If you need to need to climb a ledge, but the apex is just out of reach, switch to the Fluffy Dimension to make everything in the room cottony and near-weightless. This lets you move something extremely heavy, like a safe, into position to give you the extra height needed to climb the ledge. That is, of course, a very early encounter. The physics-based puzzles' difficulty intensifies as your progress through the game.

Quantum Conundrum scales the difficulty in a way so that you never feel overwhelmed?every solved problem gives you the proper mindset to tackle harder challenges. Before you know it, you'll lift a sofa in Fluffy Dimension, hurl it at a glass enclosure that blocks your path, shift back to the normal dimension before the sofa hits the glass, and then watch the glass shatter. These "a-ha!" moments spur an incredible sense of accomplishment that only increase as you acquire more dimensional powers, such as gravity manipulation (which you can use to send items from the floor to ceiling) and slow-motion. There are segments in the game that demand that you use all four dimensions, near-simultaneously, to achieve your goal.

The one major knock against Quantum Conundrum is the visual blandness. It's not that it lacks style?the cartoony visuals are quite appealing?but you'll see a lot of sofas, easy chairs, and safes as you progress through the game. A lot. The reason is explained in-game (one of the Quadwrangle's inventions is a replication machine that spits out a never-ending supply of those objects), but more prop diversity would have been nice.

No Purchasing Conundrum
Quantum Conundrum has light platform elements, but it's far from a twitch game. It demands that you flex your gray matter as puzzled solutions aren't spelled out?the Call of Duty "bro-gamer" may become frustrated with some of the puzzles. Patience, trial and error, and imagination are needed to overcome the tasks that fill Quadwrangle's mansion (especially in later levels), but if you're the type who welcomes such challenges, it's an incredibly satisfying ride.

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