And, unusually for such an austere concept, this is also one of the most watchable puzzle games ever made, every staunchly undramatic round likely to fill the sofa with eager spectators, each with their own strategy, none of which they are quite capable of explaining sensibly. While it's not the most complex idea, Cuboid's been exhaustively refined to the point where it's immediately addictive: the d-pad controls are nice and clean, the simple presentation means your movements are rarely obscured behind a bit of on-screen furniture, restarts are swift, and the game's levels have been pared down to the nub, with little room for error. Surely calling in an electrician would have been easier? As you play through the game, your actions gradually light up a crumbling cathedral. And when, inevitably, you get it all horribly wrong and fall off the edge of the maze, or leave even half your block dangling over empty space, it's game over and back to the beginning of the round. In these cases, you'll have to back up, perform some bizarre Euclidean variation of parallel parking, and try again. The mazes aren't always that tough, but actually working your way over to the exit is often the simple part, the real challenge kicking in once you get there and discover that you're lined up incorrectly, falling across the target rather than neatly into it. The block is twice as tall as it is wide, which means that you switch between taking up one and two tiles at a time as you role, end over end, around the floor.
#CUBOID NET SERIES#
Your task is to roll a rectangular block across a series of increasingly intricate tiled mazes, eventually dropping it through a glowing hole at the end of the course. Your fingers may know, some magical lump of bio-electrical goop inside your skull probably knows, and Cuboid itself certainly knows, but nobody's willing to say much on the subject.īut even if its strategies are hard to explain, Cuboid is ridiculously simple to actually play. When you complete a level, it's often hard to say exactly how you did it likewise, when you finally pull off a tricky manoeuvre after a half-hour of frustration, it's generally impossible to pin down just what it was that eventually clicked. Cuboid is spatial puzzling at its most austere, a series of brief, microsurgically-precise geometrical challenges which are handled, for the most part, by an area of the human brain that doesn't seem to be wired up to your internal dictionary. Seated around the flaming dinner table, having just finished off a feast composed of Cillit Bang-fried chicken and Vienetta, washed down with a generous serving of Vimto, the man responsible for the Third Reich will turn to Kharlamov in a contemplative manner, and say, "Sure, I've started wars, I've exterminated millions, and I've put fear and murder into the heart of my own people, but tell me: just how did you make the level called 'Flos' so incredibly difficult?"Īnd the answer? It's very possible that Kharlamov won't be able to say. 100 years from now, deep in the fiery depths of Hell itself, a meeting will take place between Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, whoever it was that invented the kind of plastic that cheese comes in, and Mikhail Kharlamov, the lead designer of the modest PSN puzzler, Cuboid.
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