By Mike Nelson |
Jun 21, 2012
How far can a cool gameplay mechanic carry a game?
Quantum Conundrum is many things -- an innovative puzzler, a follow-up project from Portal's Kim Swift, a lesson in bad parenting skills. Seriously, who leaves their kid on the doorstep of a crazy uncle whose house is a labyrinth of murderous puzzles? It also has its share of little annoyances, not the least of which is a poor narrative and puzzles that feature one of my most-hated gameplay mechanics. As such, Conundrum's conundrum (see what I did there?) is that it creates some unnecessary frustration around some really great ideas.
Rules? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Rules!
Conundrum's puzzles feature a clever new gameplay mechanic: shift objects and even the environment into different dimensions using the powerful Inter-dimensional Shift Device (basically, a bedazzled NES Power Glove). To navigate safely through the chasm-, laser-, and calamity-filled rooms of Professor Fitzwrangle's mansion, I had to shift the mass of objects, like turning a heavy safe from an immovable object to "fluffy."
You are the constant, so things like a giant fan creating a tornado have no effect on you.
Unfortunately, there's a double-standard in the way physics work in Conundrum. Only the
objects in the house are affected by shifts in dimension, but not my character. The narrative tries to pass this off by saying the ISD makes me immune to such changes, but I don't buy it. When I would stand over a large gated fan, for example, it didn't lift me into the air. For that to happen I needed to first stand on a something like a safe, change its mass to fluffy, and
then float upwards. Yes, it's strange, but thems the rules.
Conundrum creates a lot of wiggle room with the way its world works in order to suit its needs.
Conundrum is also very picky with the
type of object you can stand on to help solve some puzzles. I could hop on top of a safe, table, or chair, no problem. But when I turned a cardboard box into an heavy object to stand on, I slid right off. It's these inconsistencies that ruin the basic puzzle-solving logic and the potential educational appeal of QC. How do you explain the relationship of mass when you yourself are unaffected, or why these rules only apply to some objects in the house but not others? Comparatively, Portal's rules -- which is a fair and apt comparison since it's one of the genre's best -- were much more well-defined and consistent, whereas Conundrum creates a lot of wiggle room with the way its world works in order to suit its needs. But inconsistent rules weren't the aspect that really got under my skin.
Hope You Like Jumping
As a personal preference, I hate first-person platforming elements in games. Hate might not even be strong enough of a word (abhor?). That's because it's difficult to judge momentum and proper height when not viewed from the side, not to mention I can't see my damn feet. Misjudge a jump onto a floating chair and you go falling into a chasm. There's a reason this element has been stripped from most first-person shooters over the past decade: it's not fun and Conundrum doesn't do itself any favors by making this a
staple of its gameplay design. This is its biggest fault, in my opinion, in that it constantly relies on the player's ability to jump from object to object as part of its puzzle solutions. It wouldn't have bothered me as much if it was used more sparingly, but it's consistently there as the means to solve puzzles throughout the five-hour adventure.
Who thought tracing the power tube was a good idea for a puzzle?
I didn't enjoy jumping around the world of Conundrum, but there are still a lot of "woah, that's cool" moments. Like when I had to slow down time in order to reach a fast-moving safe that was hurtling through the air, or create a heavy box to block the path of a laser beam. And the later stages that required me to juggle between my four powers (you can only shift to one dimension at a time) were fun and challenging. My only failures were the result of not timing a jump just right and falling to my death.
Where's the Beef?
The narrative never gave me a justifiable reason why my protagonist should feel compelled to continue putting himself in harms way at the behest of his omnipresent narrating uncle (voiced by John "Q" de Lance). He's an inconsistent voice to boot, at times praising me for wanting to help, then chastising me for no good reason. All the while, he continuously put certain doom in my path. Maniacal destructive robots that want to destroy me, I can understand. But when a family member is constantly (and knowingly) putting me in harms way, there's nothing compelling about that.
There was no real sense of mystery to this mansion, and every hallway I traversed from room to room did little to differentiate itself.
When I first started to play Conundrum and moved through the large mansion's interior, I couldn't stop admiring the artistic design and direction. It felt like I was moving through the set of a classic LucasArts adventure game, with its exaggerated and colorful door frames and windows. And small touches like the paintings changing whenever there was a shift in dimension was a nice touch. But there was no real sense of mystery, and every hallway I traversed from room to room did little to differentiate itself from one another. Portal gave you a lot of questions you wanted answers to at the start: why am I here, what is going on, how long have I been here? Conundrum does nothing nearly as interesting with its world.
Red laser bad, blue laser good.
But surely there must be some twist in the story to make sense of all of this, because there's got to be a twist, right? Nope! Once I reached the anticlimactic ending, it became apparent that Conundrum never really had much in the way of a story to tell, and I found it to be a very poor reward for having taken the time to solve every puzzle it threw at me.
There is a challenging replay factor in going back through Conundrum, like completing levels in as few dimensional shifts as possible, or looking for hidden collectibles. And then there's an insane challenge room that can only be completed if you managed to find all of the appropriate blueprints hidden throughout the mansion. I've only unlocked three of the dimensional batteries so I can't finish this secret puzzle just yet, but it looks like a doozy.
I'm aware of the fact that it's not entirely fair to compare Quantum Conundrum to Portal -- they have
mostly different creative teams behind the scenes, different budgets, etc. But with a high-profile developer like Kim Swift at the helm, and a major publisher like Square-Enix backing the project, it's near-impossible not to. There's no disputing that Quantum Conundrum has some great ideas here, and perhaps it's even something this creative team can build upon. I just hope they dial back the amount of first-person platforming involved to solve these puzzles the next time around, and create a more-compelling world that I actually want to explore.
Spy Guy says: All this talk about first-person platforming reminds me of the final level of the original Half-Life. That level wasn't fun in 1998, and it sure isn't any better today. Still, I like me some puzzlers and for $15 it sounds like it's worth a go. Have you been playing Quantum Conundrum? What are your thoughts so far?