TL;DR – Quantum Conundrum is an alright little puzzle game, albeit one that I feel has been a little overrated. Since it came out, it’s held pretty decent reviews and general community feeling as one of the better attempts to dethrone Portal. Yet unlike Portal, I feel like Quantum Conundrum is a platformer first and a puzzle game second. That’s not to say there aren’t any nice puzzles, but generally speaking it’s a longer game with a lot of precision platforming and some occasional puzzle sections. Fortunately the controls are pretty solid and the other aspects of the game like the visuals and the characters (well, character) have been implemented well. With that being said, I’m not sure if I would recommend Quantum Conundrum. If you’re really looking for a puzzle platformer then sure, go ahead. But for everyone else I would probably skip it.
Before starting this review, I’ll just confess that Quantum Conundrum had been sitting in my backlog for around a decade before I finally got around to playing it. I actually first got it via PlayStation Plus way back in February 2013, where it sat on my PS3 until I moved onto the PS4 around 5 years later. While I don’t have PlayStation Plus any more, I did grab the game in a Steam Sale years ago and for some reason thought Spring 2024 was the time to actually play the damn thing. After doing so, I can kind of see why it was semi-popular at the time of it’s release. Although in all honesty, I found it a bit disappointing at least until I got to Act 3. You see the game is split into three acts, and the first is a bit boring (essentially the tutorial stage) and the second act is honestly a tad tedious. As a consequence, I found the game doesn’t really get going until you’re more than halfway through it. One of the reasons for this is the simple fact that Quantum Conundrum relies on the player manipulating 4 alternative versions of reality (only one can be active at a time) and you don’t get access to all 4 of them until… the last act. Now you might think the second act would be better than the first one, but honestly it just drags because so much of it is dedicating to faffing around with the third element.
I guess at this stage I should explain what the four elements are. You’ve got the ability to make everything low weight, everything very heavy, to make time go really slowly and the ability to reverse the gravity of objects. For the low weight (or the “fluffy” dimension) one, it lets you pick up and throw objects that would otherwise be too heavy. The heavy dimension makes it so that smaller objects can smash through barriers and ensures that all objects can resist lasers (which are surprisingly prevalent). While the last two are fairly self-explanatory. Combining these various abilities together can result in some fun little brain-teasers, although as mentioned you only get all four towards the end of the game. As a result, most of the early puzzles are… pretty straight forward as you want to make objects light to move them and then make them heavy to let you get past barriers, windy areas and the like. Indeed I think it’s fair to say that a surprising amount of the puzzles in Quantum Conundrum revolve around making something light so that you can throw it and then ride the thrown object to where you need to go. This is why I consider it more of a platformer than a puzzle game. There are some more unique puzzles in the game, but the majority revolve around making things light and throwing them, or making things heavy so you can get them in the right spot. In the second act, you then need to slow down time to make sure you can ride/move them properly.
Now to be fair, this isn’t the entire depth of the game. Quantum Conundrum does also require you to think about the momentum of various objects, to ensure that they can move fast enough to achieve your goals. With that being said, because the game has such a focus on momentum and throwing objects, it does also have a surprisingly high demand for precision platforming. Most of the time you die, is because you failed to achieve a jump correctly or switch elements at the exact right time. Failure with the puzzles won’t result in death, it’ll just lead you to stand there going “huh” for a while. I guess it’s worth pointing out that I thought the game wasn’t too challenging, either with the platforming or the puzzles. I think I got stuck two times throughout the whole 8 hour experience, and outside of one or two slightly pedantic platforming sections it generally wasn’t too bad.
In terms of other content, the game has a few collectibles for you to hunt for. There are blueprints that unlock the four abilities mentioned above, but in the general hub world. Then there are a series of collectible doodads that don’t add much to the game really, but hunting for them can add a bit of extra playtime for the more enthusiast players. Some of these require a creative approach to grab, so they’re not just a case of hidden little things tucked away. Which is good. Finally the game has a par-time for each stage, alongside two other ways of tracking whether or not you did a good job. The first is that it tracks whether you were able to complete a stage without dying. The second is that it tracks how many times you activate your abilities, with the aim being to have a number of uses below a set amount. This equivalent to a score tracking system is a good way of adding a bit of extra content for the 100% completionist headbangers, although most casual players probably didn’t care. I certainly know I didn’t!
And that’s about it in terms of what you get in the game, although as this was an indie release I think 8 hours + 100% completion chasing is honestly pretty fair. The game is much longer than Portal 1 was and while I don’t think it was as good, I certainly can’t complain about the amount of content you got for such a cheap little game. In terms of the rest of the production value, it’s actually pretty solid for a low budget 7th console generation game. There’s only one character with any dialogue, but he’s relatively entertaining and while not as aggressively rude as Glados is still a fun addition to the game. The game does make a big deal of how he provides hints for puzzles, but I often found the things he says were either super obvious or relatively cryptic. I guess it depends on whether you’ve figured out or not, but still. As for the visuals they’re decent, nothing that will blow your mind but the game has a slightly cartoonish graphic style that has aged gracefully and is appropriate to the setting. Finally the sound track is alright, again nothing special but the game’s general soundscape is fine.
So in conclusion then, Quantum Conundrum is a perfectly pleasant game albeit one that leans more towards being a platformer with puzzles than a puzzle game with some platforming. Depending on your expectations and preferences, this will either be a good thing or a bad thing. For me it was a bit of a disappointment, as I was hoping for a true competitor to Portal rather than a platforming game with some head-scratching moments. With that being said, I think my verdict is highly subjective and arguably not entirely fair. The game here is pretty solid and has no obvious flaws, it was just staggered too much for my taste. I think if the first Act had introduced all of the abilities and the rest of the game made use of them all, this would’ve been a great game. As it stands it’s an alright experience, but one that I probably wouldn’t recommend willynilly. Instead I think this is a good platformer with a twist, but you shouldn’t go into Quantum Conundrum expecting it to be a great puzzle game.