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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Quick Note – While this game was initially designed for Android and iOS, it’s only available on PC as of 2018. No console ports were ever released.

Considering the rough-and-tumble reputation that Deus Ex: The Fall received in the brief period of time in which it was relevant, you’d be forgiven for asking why I even bothered paying for it. Of course as my 5 (count em, FIVE) subscribers know I obviously didn’t pay any significant money for the game and it cost me around 150 pennies, but still. I could’ve bought a sausage roll, or a can of Stella Artois or something instead of what is widely considered to be the worst Deus Ex game – much to the relief of Invisible War. As ever my morbid curiosity got the better of me, as I have memories of trying Mass Effect: Infiltrator on my Gen 1 iPad back in the day and I just couldn’t get past the recurring idea that maybe those Android and iOS games from the 7th generation would’ve been fine with a normal control scheme. DE:TF kind of supports my theory, as once you play it on PC (which is now the only option!) it’s not a bad game. In fact if I were the type to dish out scores I’d give it a 6 because I was genuinely disappointed that it abruptly ended after a mere 4 hours of gameplay. Sure 6/10 isn’t a great score, but Deus Ex: The Fall is a valiant attempt at porting a great game to a lousy platform (sorry mobile gamers) and it largely succeeds, with a couple of big fat caveats.

Before diving into the issues though, I think it’s important to consider what’s actually been carried over largely intact. The core gameplay of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided has been ported over, with a decently sized weapon roster, fully functional weapon upgrades, levels that have multiple routes through them, unlockable augmentation upgrades that enable further routes and the lethal/non-lethal split for combat encounters. The game also retains the dialogue system and it’s associated upgrade, alongside e-books, a fully working port of the hacking mini-game and decent stealth gameplay. Of course there are some limitations such as some missing augmentation upgrades, smaller levels, less multi-choice dialogues and the like but the core systems are largely here and immediately identifiable. So if the core systems are fine, what’s wrong with DE:TF? Surely we should all be DTF (Down To Forgive) an ambitious and affordable game that successfully carries across most of the gameplay systems to a weaker platform of systems.

Well the first and most forgivable of the game’s issues would be the graphical limitations that come from it being designed first and foremost for mobile platforms over a condensed development cycle of only a year. While the game generally looks fine, it’s pared back significantly from it’s bigger brethren and the most noticeable cut back has been to the facial animations, with hair and eyes looking particularly janky. A considerably larger issue with the game that’s very quickly made apparent is how small each area is, from the single over-world hub that’s split into 5 areas and multiple buildings each with 0 overlap, to each of those various buildings that often feature multiple floors that are again split up by loading screens. This wouldn’t be an issue, but these areas have distinct AI and as such if you’re alerted in a building you can often just sprint past every enemy and then enter the next area. Alternatively if you take the stealthy route, you’ll often only have to deal with between 4 to 8 enemies between each loading screen. Sure the game remembers if you took down or avoided the enemies, to the point of even saving their alert status but it’s still a significant limitation. On the subject of the AI, it’s really terrible and has myriad issues. The stealth detection system doesn’t quite work right half the time and enemies manage to be both blind and surprisingly aware at the same time. Even if you’ve been detected though, the enemy is incredibly stupid and can often by tricked by simply moving slightly or even just remaining totally still on various occasions.

Perhaps the biggest problem faced by the game though is that it’s both incredibly short, with a run-time between 3 and 5 or maybe 6 hours for completionists. Short games have their place of course, but the real spoiler for Deus Ex: The Fall is that it ends on a totally unresolved cliff-hanger with a vague “TO BE CONTINUED” which comes almost as a bit of a shock. There’s even a warning that you won’t be able to finish any side quests in Hub #1 if you proceed which is true because the entire game just ends with a short cut-scene. The promise of a whole new batch of quests, essentially entire narrative and even a subplot featuring a nemesis from our protagonist’s recent past all end up going nowhere. To this day if you boot up the game there’s still an option for “additional content” on the title screen which when opened promises more content coming soon, even though it never will. So while the plot and characters are decent and make use of a rich setting, it never really gets to go anywhere and indeed will never go anywhere. You’re left with the first third of a potential game and everything, from the balancing to the story has been crafted with the intention that there will be considerably more content than what actually got made.

There are some other weird little niggles with the game that belie it’s roots as a mobile game, such as the fact that enemy “corpses” begin to disintegrate around 10 seconds after they “die” whether they’ve been taken down in a lethal or non-lethal fashion. This means that there’s no risk to having enemies be woken up by their colleagues, while non-lethal takedowns still give more XP so you get the reward without much of the risk. There’s also an in-game store, which is accessible from anywhere at any time via the menu and which enables you to buy basically anything. I can only assume the iOS/Android versions let you buy things with REAL MONEY but in the PC version it basically means that at any point you can just some more ammo, or an EMP grenade or whatever. You’re never really short of cash either, unless you’re aiming for the big ticket items so resource management isn’t much of a concern. As previously stated though the game was clearly balanced around having 3 separate acts, so I don’t think it’s possible to gain every unlock or item within the relatively small world of DE:TF. Finally it should probably be mentioned that the game has barely any enemy variety, you’ve got guards, guards with shotguns, guards with assault rifles, some rare robots (I counted 3), two turrets and a type of guard that goes invisible when they spot you. Oh and there’s a big boss robot. So basically 98% of the time you’re up against normal guys who have crap AI and anyone you knock out melts into pixels shortly after “death”. So it’s a pretty easy game, with the only real risk being that you could get caught while reading an in-game book as doing this doesn’t pause the game.

In conclusion then Deus Ex: The Fall is an ambitious game, that ports over all the core systems while botching the execution in various ways. It has a good story that abruptly ends a third of the way in, decent graphics that are let down by some poor posing and details, adequate combat that’s let down by poor enemy AI and variety, and so on. There are some decent story beats and the occasional cool moment, so I can’t be too mean on the game especially as it was made by a small team with a tight schedule for platforms with limited power. In fact the resulting game in the form of DE:TF is actually pretty impressive considering they gave about a dozen people a year to bash this out. Unfortunately though it’s hard to recommend, especially at it’s normal price because it’s just not finished. In spite of my inability to recommend the game however, I still had some fun with it and with the right mindset towards bargain bin gaming I’d say this is one to considering giving a shot. It’s nowhere as good as the main games, but of course it bloody isn’t. Most people will get this in a Deus Ex franchise bundle, and once you’ve played the bigger games this one is a fun little diversion. If you haven’t played the rest of the series, or take a dim view on deeply flawed games then obviously give this one a pass. But I personally have played much worse games, some of which I’ve even “reviewed”!

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