Brainteaser Cubes

Puzzle games have to provide the players with a certain degree of freedom when it comes to finding the solution, because it’s not very fun to fumble about until you manage to get the exact answer required to move on. Hence, multiple solutions and an open environment work best in almost all circumstances, and this also makes the game a lot easier to re-play.

Brainteaser Cubes is a puzzle game that challenges you to use your perception skills to find your way out of a variety of confusing levels, using nothing but a couple of cubes to do so. In case this sounds familiar, that’s because the idea is borrowed from Portal, where this was a side gimmick to the actual portal play. In fact, there are portals in this game as well, so it’s far from an original concept.

To begin with, everything is much simpler in regards to level design, and there’s no story to talk about either. The only goal is to pick up the cubes and place them on the buttons in order to open the doors, although it gets a bit more difficult than that later on. Hence, sometimes you have to form a ladder using the cubes in order to get out of a hole, while other times you have to throw the cubes with precision.

Everything moves slowly in the game, on the other hand, in great part due to the fact that you are always struggling to handle the cubes. Your character often fails to pick up the cubes or hold them, and the physics are just terrible when it comes to collisions. Thus, frustration kicks in when you are unable to solve the puzzles quickly enough because of this.

The graphics are nothing to write home about either, although the simplicity can be quite enjoyable sometimes, because it makes things easier to understand. On the other hand, not much thought went into the level design, since almost all of them look the same, even if the layouts get more complex later on.

In the end, Brainteaser Cubes is not exactly a masterpiece of the genre, but it has some of the ingredients required for a decent puzzle game. Thus, you can have moderate amounts of fun with it if you are patient enough.