Cube Koala Review

Cube Koala is one of those puzzle games that's almost too easy to understand, but somehow takes its simple concepts and creates nightmarishly difficult levels around them. Games that have similar design philosophies include Super Meat Boy and Escape from the Pyramid. Make no mistake though, Cube Koala is not just an also-ran in this category of super-difficult games. It's remarkable because of how pure and intense its brand of difficulty and level design is.

So, how simple is it to play Cube Koala? Players control the cube-shaped Koala through the use of only two buttons. One of these buttons rotates the game environment 45 degrees clockwise, while the other button does the reverse. As a koala trapped in a tesseract full of traps that include spikes, fireballs, and other deadly traps, players must use the force of gravity to flip the koala and reach the exit door.

In the first few levels, escaping each puzzle room is pretty trivial. These rooms present a few obstacles that are relatively spaced out and easy to avoid, but things quickly ramp up to the point where players need to dodge obstacles in mid-air, adjust trajectories while in motion, and more, all in a pretty tight sequence in order to finish a level. In these harder stages players can expect to die and restart a lot. Thankfully, restarting a stage in Cube Koala is a quick and painless affair as players are instantly transported to the start of the level upon death.

For players that get too frustrated with any given level, Cube Koala offers the ability to skip them - though this functionality is built into its free-to-play structure. After players die enough times, an "anger management" menu pops up and offers to let them skip the level in exchange for watching an ad. Overall, I found that this model worked pretty well and was mostly unobtrusive, especially when compared to how annoying ad-supported games can be.

Cube Koala is a very tight experience that's super hard, but easy to pick up and play. Its distilled nature makes it particularly compelling for short bursts on the go, though its level design allows players to maintain interest in longer sessions as well. Although it may not be the newest concept out there, Cube Koala does what it does extremely well, and thus will appeal to anyone looking for a new fiendishly difficult game to play.