Strawberry Cubes

I’ve put a bit of time in this one and let me be honest, I have no idea what I just played. It’s been said before that a certain game can’t be explained, that you have to play it to get it. I agree with that. I played Strawberry Cubes and I feel like I just played through a seizure. It’s as fascinating as it is incomprehensible.

After five minutes in Strawberry Cubes you won’t understand a single thing about what you have to do. Don’t expect that to change. However, hope that your explorer instincts kick in the right way because looking around this strange maze is the only thing that will make sense at first.

It doesn’t take much to figure out how some of the mechanics work, and a lot them are discovered through trial and error, and well, a few hints. The game slowly starts to make sense only after you ‘overload’ it a bit. How’s that? Well, using the create duplicate mechanic, for example, and spamming it like crazy enables you to break boundaries and pass through certain walls, or levels. However, this game is so confusing that almost everything feels like it’s a bug.

What's more, it never stops being strange. Never. Just when you pick up on some steps that get you from a strange point A to a less strange Point B, you slip up a bit and you go to point P where fedora wearing penguin looking dudes casually roam.

Since what you have to do is the biggest mystery, I think, how you find out how you do it is quite the journey. You have to admit that behind this logic-illusive visual design, tons of creativity can be found. Or, at this point, I’m equally convinced that this is a collection of game glitches that are fused together with the sole purpose of making you lose your mind and forever changing the way you look at strawberries.

Regardless of what Strawberry Cubes is, it’s something memorable. There are very few games that tap into this level of mystery and strange. Moreover, what’s excellent is that after a few dozen, hundred, moments of gameplay induced frustration, every little discovery feels super rewarding.

I expect Strawberry Cubes to end like the search for the answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything ended in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For those who haven’t seen the movie, I’m not going to drop a huge spoiler but know that the answer is as mind blowing as it is absurdly vague and… stupid. Nonetheless, at the end of it all you have quite the gamer’s story to share.