CubicWorld Review

It may be my lifelong fascination with dice (my parents recruited me into their D&D games at age four), but there is something quite relaxing and intriguing about moving a six-sided object around, from side to side and up and down. Cubicworld wants us to play with cubes, but has a very mellow time of it, despite some fiendishly difficult puzzles.

The concept is fairly simple and straightforward. There are tiles with colors on them, and then a receptor for that color. Rolling over it with the cube will transfer the color, but if that side of the cube touches another tile, players have to start the process over again. Connecting the color to the like-colored receptor yields impediments being removed from the path, or offers new paths to reach other colors.

While there are very difficult challenges that require some thinking inside how a box works when it is rolled about, the game has no interest in stopping player progress. Make a mistake and don’t want to roll all the way back to reapply color to the cube? Hit the undo button. Stuck on a level? That’s fine, two levels unlock each time players progress, so they can have pockets of uncompleted levels to come back to while trying something new.

Which makes sense in how the game slowly tries to train our fingers and minds into thinking of how these puzzles work (sometimes players roll around in the same pattern, because it will result in the cube having different faces being present). Unlock everything at once and it could easily discourage some people from returning, but don’t unlock enough and it will do the same.

The graphics themselves are fairly simple, with backdrops serving to fade out of mind almost completely. Given the ability to twist and turn the stage how players want it, and pinching to zoom in, or vice versa to zoom out, the focus is clearly just on the puzzle at hand. There are no frills, nor must there be.

For a quick game that can be put down when players get frustrated or have to engage in something else, Cubicworld is a fun little brain twister. It scratches that itch that wants to challenge our minds with classic puzzles that make us approach problems in new ways.

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