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.

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Super Mario 64 is one of the most famous games ever made and a memorable part of my childhood, albeit one that didn’t get resolve until the year 2024. I was on the fence about whether to even bother writing up a short review of this one, considering how exceedingly famous it is and consequentially how pathetically low my search engine result ranking for this game will be. Then again I have no readers, and nothing better to do so here we are. It turns out Super Mario 64 is a great game and still holds up pretty well (basic visuals not withstanding I suppose), with the exception of the camera. Everything else from level design, to the difficulty, to the soundtrack and even the controls has been done well. I’m actually surprised I never got the ending to be honest, considering the fact that getting the credits to play only took me… maybe a dozen hours?

Oh well, weird lapses in judgement aside I can safely reiterate that Super Mario 64 remains a great game with just the right amount of challenge across it’s 15 courses. The initial four are pretty easy and outside of some tricky parts where you need to shoot yourself out of a cannon with precision, there really isn’t too much challenge here. Once you start unlocking the latter stages however, things get a bit more challenging as the game loves to enforce some surprisingly precise platforming onto the player. One thing I should’ve mentioned earlier is that each of the game’s 15 courses contains 7 stars (no, not 6). When you enter a stage, you select which of these stars you are aiming for. These stars sometimes involve changing the level slightly, but generally there are 7 objectives within the stage. With two of these objectives always being “gather the 8 red coins” (that are scattered around) and gather 100 normal coins, however it pleases you. The remaining 5 stars will generally be hidden around the level, sometimes in the possession of bosses or requiring some environmental chicanery to unlock. To spice things up, Super Mario 64 locks segments of the overworld (Peach’s castle) behind minimum star requirements and locked doors. To unlock these doors, you’ll need to collect enough stars and then defeat Bowser. Each time you face off against the loathsome lizard is largely the same, although he gets new attacks with each encounter. For the standard 70-star ending, you’ll need to beat him 3 times across 3 separate levels. There are also 3 types of cap that can be obtained, each of which acts as a temporary power-up and requires you to activate a switch in one of the game’s many bonus levels. You’ve got a flight cap, a metal cap and an invisible cap which let you fly, walk in water (instead of swimming) and go through certain walls/objects respectively.

While these power-ups are cool, the main reason they work is that the game is able to successfully juggle some light puzzle elements with solid platforming and a mix of enemies and different objectives. Most of the time, these objectives aren’t too difficult. Yet the high quality OST track, balanced challenge and way that each stage successfully has it’s own theme makes the whole game a pleasant experience to play. These themes range from a water world centred around a ship that may or may not have sunk (depending on the star), to rainbow rides in the sky through to simple grassland courses and a desert level with an explorable pyramid. As for progression, the fact that you only need to gather a certain amount of stars, while having multiple courses unlocked at a time is a great idea. For the simple reason that it’s very hard to get stuck in Super Mario 64, with the range of stages available letting you focus on the ones that you actually want to do. Even the frustrating camera angles aren’t able to hold Super Mario 64 back, and the fact that you have essentially unlimited continues (at least if memory serves – the game isn’t particularly challenging) means it’s hard to stay mad at Super Mario 64. If you’re really struggling with a certain level’s obstinate platforming requirements, then you can always just jog on to another stage and come back to that one later. Plus as mentioned there are multiple hidden stages, and “free” stars given by talking to one of the various instances of Toad stuck in the walls. As such progression is nearly inevitable, yet the game is able to keep players playing due to the variety in objectives and solid control scheme which makes exploring the levels (and castle) quite fun.

To give some examples, one world (or course) can only be accessed by repeatedly “killing” a certain enemy, while others are hidden behind seemingly normal walls or are only revealed in a mirror. Some stages require you to stare at the ceiling, or enter an inconspicuous hole in a wall. Generally speaking the castle, while quite small in reality does a great job of making the whole experience feel like a unified whole. As for the stages, the modest changes that occur between each star do a great job of making them feel larger and more varied than they actually are. Plus having to track down secret stages to unlock the power-ups which are required for certain stars is a prudent move, as it forces the player to engage with exploring the castle even if they aren’t so inclined. Even smaller touches such as having the camera be controlled by a floating NPC (that you can occasionally see) or having Mario take a nap if you leave him alone for a little bit of time show that Super Mario 64 is a game that was made with a lot of attention to detail, in spite of the exceedingly modest polygon budget.

Which isn’t to say that the game is flawless, because that would just be silly. Every game has flaws, except maybe for Tetris. In Super Mario 64’s case, there are three that stood out to me. One that’s quite inconsequential but still bizarre is the way in which the game just resets how many lives you have every time you save and exit the game. It’s not a huge issue, but if you’ve gone out of your way to gather 1-ups and extra lives then… too bad! The game doesn’t care, and if you leave the game and come back to it then you go back to having 4 lives in reserve for some reason. Another issue that’s more of an issue is the way in which Mario can’t just turn around if he’s in motion, even if it’s a very slight motion. This isn’t a big deal, but for precision platforming it makes the game more of a pain than it has to be. If Mario is still, then moving back will cause him to turn around and move backwards. If he is dealing with the slightest bit of motion, then he will move forward in a radius and then start moving backwards. When the platforms are oh so small, this can and will cause you to fall off them (and probably die). Again a relatively small issue, but one I wanted to mention. Alongside the game’s biggest issue, which is a somewhat annoying camera. For the time the camera was fine, but by modern standards the lack of full rotation and fondness for awkward angles make platforming a chore sometimes. As mentioned, some of the platforming is exceedingly precise and with the inclusion of momentum physics and important of hitting a jump at the right angle or speed having an inconsistent camera can be a real issue. Even relatively basic areas like the boss fights against Bowser or jumping up a pyramid in the desert stage can really screw with the player, setting them back a bit. Does the camera ruin Super Mario 64? Of course not, but it’s by far my biggest gripe with the game.

But notwithstanding those modest issues, Super Mario 64 is just a great game. It’s a 3D platformer that shows everyone else how it’s done, with a solid colour palette, smart stage design (some levels even change based on how you enter them), memorable soundtrack, varied enemy roster, deft handling of an overworld that’s fun to explore and an intuitive control scheme. In conclusion then, this review is pointless but you should still give Super Mario 64 a go if you haven’t already tried it. There are plenty of small touches that truly make it something special, and even if you don’t get that far then you’ll be able to enjoy the first few stages which are all fun to play and do a good job of letting you just get on with the game. Those who can stick with Super Mario 64 will find a rewarding platforming experience, that isn’t afraid to force you to explore a level of repeat a particularly tricky jump to get the reward.

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I’ll start off by saying that hating on De Blob doesn’t feel great, because it’s clearly a cute little passion project that has some sensible design and started life as a Wii game. This means it’s fairly easy, the controls are a bit janky and that it’s targeting a younger and/or more casual audience. But honestly, who wouldn’t want to be a big colourful blob fighting some quasi-fascist meanies while painting the world and listening to some smooth tunes? It’s this thought that led to me buying the game, and it’s this thought that I cursed while struggling through the midway point of it. For some reason De Blob is one of those games that starts weak, then gets terrible before snapping out of it and having a couple of decent levels at the end. I can only imagine this is a big factor in the absolutely pitiful Xbox achievement completion rates, with around 1/4 players finishing the first level and less than 1 in 100 finishing all 10 levels. I am now part of that elite core, even though it only took like… 5 and a bit hours? De Blob is not Le Complicated, it’s a fairly simple platformer where you are trying to yoink colour from the world so that you can use it to paint things and jump-attack the baddies. The twist is that each stage has both a (very generous) timer and a scoring system, so you need to gain enough points to unlock the next part of each level. With each level having 3 or 4 parts. To help you SCOREMAXX you can complete various challenges, which have less generous timers and involve painting certain objects in certain colours, beating X number of designated baddies and platforming to a certain point following a fixed route. Then there’s a more substantial series of challenges, where basically you need to gather enough of a certain type of paint and then mash the A button. What makes these more substantial is the fact that they (sometimes) unlock new areas, while the rest never do. Which means most of the challenges are entirely optional, but they’re an easy way to get enough score to unlock the rest of the level and so they’re generally recommended.

The main other way to gain score is to… hold onto your hats… paint things! Considering this is the big gimmick of the game, that makes sense. The twist is that you’ll want to paint various items that are in the same group in different colours, as painting them all the same colour gives you 100% of the points, while 2 different gives you 200%, 3 gives you 300% and so on. There are 7 colours you can use, so in theory you can get up to 700% of the score for each group. If this sounds confusing (“wtf is a group” you might be wondering), then it’s just a semi-arbitrary way the game clusters buildings together. So if there are a bunch of apartment buildings, warehouses etc they will be split into Avenues and you’ll need to paint every one of them to get any score bonus. Once you’ve painted a group, the inhabitants will spill out and then you can paint them too! Don’t worry though, because they love it. You see the plot such as it is, features all of the colourful fun loving inhabitants of radia (radian?) getting INKED by the bad guys and now everything is drab and monotonous and boring and sucks. So Blob and La Revolucion are in town to paint everything and everyone and turn tank factories into wicked sick DJ buildings and so on. As you can probably tell, the plot is super basic but hey that’s fine. Mario never had a great plot either (shush JRPG fans no one cares). The game even has a bunch of short cutscenes between missions, with a heavy focus on slapstick physical humour and 0 words being used. It’s no Tom and Jerry but these are fine and honestly if I was like… 8 they might’ve been funny. Unfortunately I’m 28 and have a rich and fulfilling life blog so they weren’t quite for me.

But the cutscenes weren’t bad, and the core idea of painting a video game world is a fun one. So why am I not recommending this game??? Well the simple reason is that it’s just kind of annoying to control. Not only does the game love to show you when things are unlocked with a panoramic view of where this new doodad is located, but generally the platforming feels kind of iffy too. This means that during encounters or the mini-challenges, you’ll often fluff a jump which screws everything up because De Blob got De Stuck on a wall, due to the fact that he latches onto walls. Or maybe you wanted to jump-attack an enemy or lock onto an object you have to paint. Well too bad because De Blob wants to De Lock-on to some extra paint, with bonus points for the multiple occasions where this caused him to be Le Wrong Colour now and thus screwed up the pacing even more. Even if you can overlook this admittedly modest issues with the control scheme, the pacing of the game is just bizarre. Sometimes you’ve absolutely crushing it score-wise and other times you’re just looking for what handful of things you’ve missed and haven’t painted yet. For context, in both cases the best I’ve been able to achieve is a meagre Silver medal, so I can’t imagine the sheer hellish experience that is aiming for 100% completion in every level. Close to half the achievements involve painting EVERYTHING, whether it be EVERY TREE or EVERY BUILDING or whatever it is. If you know someone with OCD and despite them, then encouraging them to play De Blob is a good way to make them suffer.

Which is honestly a shame because it’s clear the developers weren’t total fools, there are some cases of smartly implemented player leniency related to narrowly beating out the clock during timed challenges. Plus the difficulty isn’t that high, while the soundtrack is pretty good so this should be a nice casual experience. I mean you get to choose your background track from a selection of around 11 and these also change the sound effects that play when you paint stuff, activate ultimate mode and so on. Yet it’s just a game that feels like a slog, because you’re just doing challenge after challenge after challenge and they’re all basically the same and then the game goes GOOD JOB NOW GO TO THE NEXT AREA. NO WE WON’T SHOW YOU WHERE IT IS WITH A MARKER, GO FIND IT. Again I feel like a loser for whining about the lack of markers, but sometimes the panoramic view is of an area you’ve never been to so you just kind of have to roll around until you figure out roughly where that one gate is. Oh and to add to the fun controls, there’s some occasional sections that require some relatively tight platforming performance lest you get hit by spikes or insta-killed by electricity. Which wouldn’t be a big issue, but the way damage and health works in De Blob is De Weird.

So I’ve already mentioned that you want to gain colour, the way it works is that you can have a maximum of 100 colour regardless of what colour that is. No you can’t store multiple colours, as you touch a new one it either mixes (so yellow + blue = green) or you just become that colour (e.g. green + blue = blue). It costs 1 colour to paint most objects in the game. Enemies also require a certain amount of colour to defeat. As do some objective types (the ones where you mash A). What does this mean? Well you might need to be green to colour in a set of buildings. Each building you colour in, costs 1 colour. To get more colour, you will no longer be green unless you can remix your colours to return to green. Defeating enemies also costs your green colour unless you are a different one. In the early game this isn’t really an issue, but later on most cost between 10 and 100 colour, so you need to be very careful with what you touch lest you be just 1 colour short of taking out that tank or objective. Then if you do hit by the bad guys, then you are INKED and lose colour every second or die once you hit 0 colour. So you need to spend health to damage the enemy, while being restricted in what health pickups you can take lest you be the wrong colour for the objective. It’s not challenging, it’s just kind of annoying that you might need to be Purple and then you accidentality brush up against some yellow pickup, meaning you are now brown, so you need to find a blue and a red while not touching anything, while getting hit by the enemies. Remember, this is a game where the control is kinda jank. In part because as you gain health, you are a bigger blob, so you move and jump slightly worse. Each of these mechanics is cool by itself, in combination they lead to irritating situations. Especially when the pacing kind of sucks, which it does for most of the levels (I’d say it turns around by level 8, but again there are only 10 levels).

The game also has some other content, including free paint mode where you can fart around each level for as long as you want and some side missions which I honestly haven’t played. Mainly because as stated, less than 1% of players even finished the game and I didn’t really have fun with it so… I think I’ve been unusually charitable towards it. I mean I bought, I tried it, I finished it, I even wrote a review about it. I can even still say the music is good, the premise is nice, the game world is charming and the way that you paint the world is satisfying. Unfortunately the gameplay which is pretty important for a videogame just feels rough. Like it has all the pieces, but the combination of a slightly rough control scheme with the specifics of the colour system, with the sluggishly paced levels and the repetition just makes what should be a short game feel like a grind. Which is ironic for a game in which you play as De Blog, De Hero of the world saving it from monotony. Much like Legendary I know the developers meant well and I’m glad they got the chance to make a sequel. Hopefully it fixes some of the quirks of this game and has better controls, less repetition and some other modest tweaks. Considering the final stages were actually fun, I can only assume De Blob 2 is a better game. Especially as it wasn’t developed for the Wii, so I can only assume it plays a bit better. With that being said, I’ll wrap up by saying that De Blob is just kind of a chore to play and I can’t really recommend it to anyone.

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