Everyone has a few strange family members. Your family is extra strange though. For one Grandma Quadwrangle used to always say to remember and use your dimensions. You had not freaking clue what she meant by this, but she seemed to say it a lot. Then there is your uncle, Professor Fitz Quadwrangle. Your mother drops you off at his house every so often and he also greets you with whatever his newest invention may be. In the past these have been jet packs and freeze rays. This time you arrive and the power goes out. Once emergency power comes back up he is able to see and talk to you, but does not remember how he go where he is. Now it is up to you to restore power to the mansion with your uncle’s help.

Introducing the IDS (Interdimensional Shift Device)

As much as he would prefer to not do this, your Uncle has you grab the prototype IDS in order swap between the different dimensions without getting affected yourself. As you adventure between the different rooms you place IDS batteries (many of which are given to you by IKE) into receptacles in order to access up to 4 different dimensions. The first you get access to is Fluffy dimension. Here everything becomes soft and very light. This is most often used to move objects such as safes and furniture. Next is Heavy dimension, which makes everything incredibly dense. This allows cardboard boxes to press switches or items to become indestructible. Third is a slow-mo dimension. Here everything runs at an extremely slow speed allowing you to jump on fast moving objects or create a platform to jump on. The last dimension you get to play with is reverse gravity. This is handy as anything thrown keeps its momentum until it hits something. Since the glove is a prototype it does have a limitation to it. The puzzle area you are in must have the aforementioned dimensional battery in a special receptacle to access that dimension. When you leave the area, you lose access to the dimensions. This allows for limitations to be set on how to solve a particular room. Another thing you will find extremely handy is that you can swap from one dimension to the next without having to transition back to normal. This makes it very easy to toss something through lasers or create a platform. The tools of the IDS are now at your disposal, are you smart enough to use them?

Welcome to Heavy DimensionPuzzler or Platform?

Quantum Conundrum is billed as a puzzle game, but I don’t necessarily agree with that. Now this is not to say that there are not any puzzles in the game, it is just that most of these are not very complex. The part that makes these games difficult is making the jumps once you have the puzzles figured out. There are jumps that do need to be timed perfectly or you will have to set everything back up again, or you will die and start again from the last checkpoint. This gives the game a much more platformer feel to it then puzzler, but this is not really a bad thing. A good number of games anymore are blends of genres rather than a single genre.

Professor Fitz Quadwrangle - He Never Shuts Up

Throughout the game your Uncle will consistently talk to you, tell you where to go, and tell you what to do. He is extremely condescending during most of it. After all, you are an idiot nephew (at least in his eyes) that he did not want to see and he is an mad scientist (the good kind). Most the time what he says can be entertaining. He will explain how things work, complain about you destroying windows, and give you the origins of many of the portraits in the mansion. He also closes potential plot holes in why certain things are not affected by the dimensional shift (such as lasers). The writing is not as good as Portal though, but few things will be. Also, if you are bored, check out the titles of his books, the more nerdy of you will get a chuckle.

The Overall

Is this a good game? I would say it is, it is not a great game, but it is a good game. The puzzles can be a little complex, but most of it is based on timing that jump juuuusssst right.  The biggest complaint of mine would be the endgame felt a little lacking. It took you back to the most basic of methods you learned early in the game, maybe trying to get you to overthink things. There is going to be some DLC for the game though (at minimum two packs), so that might improve things and allow you more experiments with the IDS.

3 / 5 Joysticks