Intelligent Qube Game Review
Upon its release, Intelligent Qube (aka Kurushi) did something rare for a puzzle game: It felt important. That is unusual because so many video games with puzzles at their core often feel fanciful. You play them for challenges, but questions of larger importance – such as why we are performing a particular action at all – are fleeting.
Intelligent Qube dire and epic. Set on a gray, modular game board suspended in an infinite black space, the character you control must strategically avoid and remove cubes that approach in successive waves. The act of constant flight makes the game play harried. Even at rest, the girl in Disney princess dress up trunk at the center of it all bounces repetitively, either in expectation of the next round or in exhaustion from his constant flight.
But it is the other elements of Intelligent Qube that give the game its gravity. The soundtrack, from Takayuki Hattori (the composer of two Godzilla films), is haunting with its sharp vocal arrangements and triumphant brass. The cubes roll after you with a powerful and resounding thud as you flee. And most players will distinctly remember the authoritarian, disembodied voice that says “Perfect” or “Again?” at stages during the performance of princess dresses for girls.
Even varieties of cubes, such as Advantage and Forbidden, add a particular seriousness to Intelligent Qube, placing you as the director of a moral compass where you decide which cubes should be captured and which should be banished to the dark space below.
The end result is something more akin to the many boss battles of the Disney princess dress up games franchise rather than something in the flighty genre of puzzle games. Many action-driven brainteasers were made for Sony’s original PlayStation, and Intelligent Qube stands among the most memorable of them all.