Review for The Last Cube
There are a few different sides to The Last Cube, a puzzle-focused adventure by Improx Games. On its face, there’s a lot to like about the sizable, neon-touched, sci-fi locales, the epic soundtrack, and the clever puzzles. The various collectibles, challenges, and bits of lore add interest. It’s geometrically solid, but scratching a bit beneath the surface area, these elements come together to form a few rough edges and sharp vertices.
You play as, believe it or not, the last cube, a sentient block that traverses large levels packed with movement-based logic puzzles for – well, it’s not entirely clear what exactly you’re doing it for. As you progress and find collectibles (called “relics”) scattered through the futuristic architecture on this cube-shaped planet, you’re drip-fed bits of the story about where you are and what has happened up to this point. Every tile, environment, and object has seemingly been wrapped into the world's lore, and it’s a slightly complex mix of an apocalyptic storyline, social commentary, and philosophical musings on ethics and sentience. The tone of these entries ranges from over-earnest to tongue-in-cheek, and it’s hard to get your bearings on how seriously you should take any of it.
The story is primarily tucked away in entries you find through optional collectibles hidden in each location, so the main focus is on the puzzling gameplay. Your goal in each level is simply to roll the cube from the beginning to the end, one grid tile at a time, overcoming any barriers along the way. To do this, you will gain powers in the form of “stickers”, colored tiles that will create an imprint on any face of the cube that rolls onto them. As such, you can have as many as six different stickers at a time, and you can use the corresponding power of whichever sticker is currently facing up at any given moment; for instance, rotating in place, teleporting to a nearby tile, or creating a temporary clone of yourself. Combining these abilities with typical puzzles involving buttons, switches, and elevators provides logical challenges for each level.
I had some concern early on that the sheer size of the levels and the number of mechanics being regularly introduced would make for some unwieldy puzzles as time went on, drawing more difficulty from complexity than from clever design. Fortunately I found that, in most cases, restraint won out. The puzzles were usually limited to a small subsection of the larger area, allowing you to focus on what’s immediately around you without having to keep the larger level structure in mind. Even the gauntlet of challenges at the end of the game was more fun than overwhelming.
One caveat is that rolling a cube around a grid is relatively unintuitive, and it can be frustrating when you’re trying to land a specific face of the cube on a particular tile with the cube rotated just the way you want it. The designers attempt to alleviate this: when you’re near certain tiles that respond to the stickers you have on your cube, you can press a key to see a glowing path that shows you how exactly to roll your cube to place the correct sticker on the tile. While I appreciated this (and used it often), plenty of other situations still required precision of movement without the guided help, and I often found myself rolling the cube around in tight circles, trying to arrange it just so. Perhaps other players could better get the hang of it, but I used a lot of trial-and-error on these situations throughout the game.
The 3D environments are intriguing and expansive: natural biomes containing large metal and concrete structures punctuated with bright neon strips. Each side of the world sports its distinct design and color scheme, falling squarely within a fairly traditional sci-fi aesthetic. The animations are weighty and satisfying, accentuating your actions with bright glowing particles, blurs, and time-warping effects. The accompanying sounds are well-chosen, but the heavy-hitting, epic music seems a better fit for an action game than a contemplative puzzler and grated on the nerves just a few minutes into each level.
The optional content is a nice touch, though a bit of a mixed bag. The handful of relics you can collect at each level are the biggest draw since these unlock lore entries and give you more context for the sci-fi environments you inhabit. Some of these are cleverly placed, requiring more puzzle-solving to be able to reach – others might just be hiding behind a pillar somewhere. When you finish a level, there’s also a bonus challenge to complete the level again under some given constraint. Furthermore some of these are fun, requiring, er, outside-the-box thinking; but many of them seemed tedious, like speed runs or completing the level in a certain number of steps.
Those looking for depth of world-building or narrative progress may not be satisfied with The Last Cube. But perhaps you like the idea of some well-designed logic puzzles set in sci-fi landscapes and can overlook the occasional fiddling with the movement mechanics and inconsistent quality of bonus challenges. In that case, I’d suggest you – wait for it – block out some time for this one.
