Quantum Conundrum Preview

Square Enix and Airtight Games have been busy over the past week, showing off Quantum Conundrum at both the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and South by Southwest Screenburn in Austin, Texas, giving gamers their first look at the newly revealed in-game dimension: the Heavy Dimension.

Quantum Conundrum is a first-person puzzle game, brought to gamers by the creative minds behind the critically acclaimed Portal. Like Portal, the game will focus on self-contained puzzles with definite solutions, tasking players with completing one before moving on to the next. Unlike Portal, however, this downloadable title lets players switch between four different dimensions to affect the world around them and assist in their interaction with the game’s environment to solve those puzzles.

Physics play a big and important role in Quantum Conundrum. The primary direct interaction players will have with the game world will be picking up, carrying, tossing, and placing objects. Enter the IDS, or Interdimensional Shift Device, a glove the game’s 12-year-old protagonist finds in the mansion laboratory of his eccentric scientist uncle. The IDS switches the game world between four dimensions: Fluffy, where objects are lighter than usual; Heavy, where they’re more massive; Slow Motion, where time moves at one-tenth normal speed; and Reverse Gravity, which flips the gravitational pull in the game world.

Each of these dimensions will be immediately recognizable, too, by the distinct graphical filters applied over the already cartoon-stylized aesthetics. The Fluffy dimension, for example, will take on a glazed white look, and the Slow Motion dimension will surround objects in a yellow-greenish glow. The combination of physical and visual characteristics of each of these dimensions is sure to make Quantum Conundrum feel dynamic in its moment-to-moment play.

The switch from normal to Fluffy dimensions.

And play looks to be key, here. Manipulating dimensions will allow players to do things like lift objects higher than normally possible, weigh down resistant pressure plates, hit switches that are fixed to the ceiling, float objects across a room, and, as seen in one of the game’s demo videos, slow a falling pillar to use it as a bridge across an immense chasm, among many other cleverly designed conundrums.

We look forward to more from Airtight’s Quantum Conundrum here at GN, and are ready to shift dimensions on Xbox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Network, and Steam when the game is released later this year.