Indie Games: Narbacular Drop

You’ve played Portal, right? Of course you have! Portal is great and if you haven’t played it then you should. Buy it, download it, enjoy it, it’s great.

Why do I bring up Portal? Well, Narbacular Drop is the reason Portal exists. Developed by Nuclear Monkey Software, Narbacular Drop is a game project by a group of students at DigiPen Institute of Technology. From this the developers went on to be hired by Valve to help create Portal.

The gameplay of Narbacular Drop is fairly simple and similar to Portal. You create portals around the environment to solve puzzles and get to the end of the level. Not having a jump ability means that utilising these portals effectively is key to get to the end of a stage. And it's fun.

The gameplay is pretty solid and you can see where Portal came from. The controls are simple to use and solving puzzles is simple enough. From reading around (Wikipedia) it seems this game was to show off what the developers could do and it seems they could do a fair bit. Viewing the game from the standpoint of this being proof of applied concept you can tell a lot of work went into this and that the people who made it had a lot of skill.

There’s not a massive amount to really say about this game other than that it is essentially Portal. There is a story attached, but it is extremely basic and obviously put in only as a framing device, however it does show that the developers were creative outside of the actual gameplay.

If you really enjoyed Portal and want to see its roots then give this game a go. It’s only 6 levels long but really shows off what the developers could do. If you don’t care that much about understanding the humble beginnings of a great game then just play more Portal. It’s a more polished version of this game and fun to boot!

Q.U.B.E.

Platform Reviewed: PC

Q.U.B.E. (or Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion) is an independent First Person puzzle game in which you must complete tasks within a testing facility. You do this by using a pair of gloves in order to move blocks to achieve your goals.

Sooner or later I’d have to mention Portal, so I may as get it done with now. The game looks and feels a lot like Portal. Now, some may call the game out on this, calling it a rip-off and the likes, but I do not. Personally, it feels more like the gaming is proudly showing its influences. I’m fine with it. I don’t really want to talk about the game in comparison with Portal. I want to look at the game on its own merits, so let’s speak no more of Portal.

The mechanics of this game work extremely well. You use your power gloves to extrude block from the walls. You do this in order to create platforms, move coloured balls into their respective pits or to make light shine on a sensor. The entire game uses these mechanics in increasingly complex ways to create a very effective, though slightly too sharp, difficulty curve. I have heard reports of some of the game’s physics being a bit screwy at times, however I never came across these and the entirety of the game worked perfectly on a physics level.

In regards to the difficulty curve I have to commend this game: no in-game tutorial. You get to grips with the controls and the world through experimentation and simply looking around you and it’s fun. It’s interesting. It’s engaging. You feel intelligent for figuring things out. If the game pummelled me with text boxes and such at the beginning of the game I feel I’d be thrown out of the experience, as I found myself to be getting quite engrossed in the game itself. It does well to introduce all of the new blocks and mechanics to you throughout. When you discover how to use each mechanic to its fullest it’s rewarding.

Sadly, some of the mechanics of this game aren’t quite up to scratch. The magnet puzzles. Oh, the magnet puzzles. It’s at this point when the difficulty curve goes from a bit steep to simply asymptotic. Q.U.B.E. touts them as the hardest in the game and they are, but this seems to be because they mostly revolve around blind luck. I spent ages attempting one puzzle, not sure how to do it when suddenly it seemed to solve itself.

Also, these magnet puzzles are hampered by a fair delay on use of the gloves, making precision a key issue in the game. Whilst I do think the puzzles worked extremely well they did often take a lot longer than expected as there seemed to be a noticeable delay between clicking and the gloves working. This resulted in me clicking manically until the gloves finally worked, but all too late.

There also seems to be some attempt at narrative in the game. The game takes away from the normal test chambers and goes into the deep underbelly of the facility (like some other games that I promised not to mention later on). Whilst one might expect to find out that something has gone on down here we aren’t really left with much. I wouldn’t have minded if this game was devoid of narrative, as it’s a pretty fun puzzle game, but the way in which it attempts it slightly makes me wonder what plans they had.

The narrative also runs into a wall when the ending comes around. The ending seems to linger for a while, waiting for you to have the eureka moment and figure out what the entire game was all about. But there is no eureka moment. All I ever thought was “Wow, I’m enjoying these puzzles.” The semblance of a plot that went nowhere took away from this slightly, which is disheartening as I was really enjoying the game and its evolving mechanics.

 

Despite this criticism, I loved this game. It was extremely fun and challenging. It didn’t frustrate too often, but when it did it was usually the frustration you would attribute to any regular puzzle game (except for the magnet puzzles, of course). There’s a lot of room for improvement and the game could be a bit longer (the game was about 3 hours long), but it was still a genuinely enjoyable game. It might not be entirely original, but it still does what it sets out to do with enough competence for you to put this issue aside.