Kim Swift, one of the designers of the groundbreaking Portal, is at Penny Arcade Expo to show that she’s not out of clever game ideas.
On Saturday evening, Swift and her team at Airtight Games will host a PAX panel and give fans the first glimpse at Quantum Conundrum, a first-person, physics-based puzzle game coming next year for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. Fans of Portal will find the downloadable game to be comfortingly familiar, from the quirky sense of humor to the clever puzzle design.
Wired.com saw a hands-off demo of Quantum Conundrum, to be published by Square Enix, on Friday morning. You play as a young boy at your uncle’s house, which would be a dreary scenario were it not for the fact that your uncle is a mad scientist who’s invented an interdimensional glove. You soon discover that you can use this glove to instantly jump back and forth between different dimensions, all of which have special properties.
At this point in the explanation I thought to myself, “I feel like I’ve played things like this before.” As it turns out, the first dimension they showed us was the “Fluffy” dimension. In this dimension, everything is made of cotton balls. Thus was I immediately proven wrong.
In the Fluffy dimension, everything weighs 10 times less. So our young hero can easily pick up a heavy iron safe and move it into a more advantageous position and use it as a stepping stool to an otherwise unreachable ledge. At this point, he could jump on the cotton safe, but because it weighs less, Swift said, it might get knocked around. So it’s best to switch back into the normal dimension to do the platforming.
A typical scenario later in the game will have you puzzling over how to use a whole variety of “dimensions” to solve a puzzle. In addition to “Fluffy,” there are “Slow Motion” and “Reverse Gravity” dimensions. So let’s say for example that you had to traverse a large bottomless pit. You might:
- Throw the safe;
- Switch to slow-motion while the safe is still close to you;
- Jump onto the now barely-moving safe;
- Switch back and forth between reverse gravity and normal so that the safe, with forward momentum, floats in a sine-wave pattern towards the exit.
This last effect — switching back and forth between gravities to cause something to float along — arose spontaneously as a result of Quantum Conundrum’s existing game physics, Swift said, and her team quickly implemented puzzles using it into the game.
Portal, a game that had its origins in a student project that Swift worked on when she was still in school, was a smash hit not only because of its clever gameplay but because of its well-written, humorous characters and scenario. The demo of Conundrum was mute, and probably for good reason; having the game narrated by a snarky disembodied voice probably would have been a little too on the nose.
Airtight Games (making a clean break from its last project, the ambitious but fatally flawed Dark Void) is instead going for visual humor. Photos of your uncle and his pets line the hallways of the mansion, and they change when you flip dimensions. Switch to “Fluffy” and everybody has bunny suits on. Switch to “Slow Motion” and everybody is painted to be looking at their watch, including the goldfish if you zoom in on it close enough.
If this year’s Portal 2 had an Achilles’ heel, it’s that it’s difficult to surprise players with a sequel. There’s great potential for Quantum Conundrum to do that — which is why I’m hoping we don’t hear too much more about it following Saturday evening’s panel.
