Q.U.B.E.: The Director's Cut is a short game with a coherent narrative that doesn't interrupt the flow of the game itself. That alone is more than most games can manage. Many people will be tempted to dismiss this game as overly derivative. There's a hint of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and there's a dash of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The game doesn't just look and play vaguely like Portal; the narrative assumes that the player has played Portal, and uses that presumed knowledge for its own purposes. The narrative hinges on two unseen voices: a woman who asks for faith in the unbelievable, and a man (sounding like a serious-faced version of Wheatley from Portal 2) who encourages doubt by playing off the player's feeling that Toxic Games has straight up stolen from Valve. It's not ashamed to show its influences, but it becomes its own thing. There's a subtle motif of pointless repetition that's reinforced by the "doubt" character, and it contrasts heavily with the syrupy emotions reinforced by the "faith" character. I don't want to spoil the ending, but there's plenty of ambiguity to it if you read between the lines. I love it. The puzzles themselves are almost all easy. Some of the puzzles require a bit of quick action on the player's part, but it's nothing that most people couldn't handle. I finished in about 4 hours. My only significant criticisms are that the game uses far more computing resources than it has any right to use, and the narrative implies that the player can choose between one of two decisions when -- as far as I can tell -- the player can actually only make one choice that leads to one ending. I was going to make that choice anyway; it was simple moral calculus, but other players may feel differently.
