Let’s say Doc and Marty did 88 into another dimension, and met up with GlaDOS and some cloned cats. The result would be Quantum Conundrum. After the launch of Portal 2, Kim Swift left Valve and came up with the idea of Quantum Conundrum, an all new platform and cerebral puzzle game coming to XBLA, PSN, and PC this summer. If you even only slightly like Portal, you’ll for sure fall in love with this new title.

When asked how she came up with the idea, Swift said, “Honestly, I was walking down the street eating a croissant and then I thought, ‘Hey, this would make a really good game.’ I pitched around, and Square picked me up, and we’re really happy with the results.”

The Fluffy Dimension!

Quantum Conundrum is a title that takes Portal and adds more dynamic gameplay and a hefty amount of story. You play as Professor Quadwrangle’s nephew, who’s dropped off at the scientist’s crazy house of puzzle rooms. You hear a loud explosion, and go to investigate as the young protagonist holds a rather Doc-Marty relationship with his wacky uncle.

Using the Interdimensional Shift Device, you have access to three other dimensions: Fluffy, Reverse Gravity, slow motion, and Normal. Using each dimension’s inherent properties, and quickly switching between them, you must solve the puzzles to exit the room and get closer to your uncle. For example, to hover a heavier object across a room, you use Fluffy to make it lighter so that you may throw it, and then quickly switch between Reverse Gravity and Normal for a hovering effect. Think of it as flipping switches in Portal to alter areas or launch objects out of other areas. In Portal you use your portal gun to pick up objects and place them in places to set other things off and carry them to more relevant locations. Quantum Conundrum has the same idea except you physically alter the environment to make yourself able to relocate things.

EVIL JUICE!

The graphics of Quantum Conundrum are quite different from other games we’ve experienced lately. “I honestly told my concept artist to just paint stuff,” Swift said laughing. “I wanted a lot of art in the game, so I basically told him I’d make something out of anything he came up with.” Walking around the hallways of the crazy house, you notice that not only are there a ton of original art pieces, but that they change when you alter the dimension, as well. As you pass by a photo of your uncle and switch to the Fluffy dimension, for example, suddenly your uncle is in a fluffy pink bunny suit. Swift also noted she wanted it to be colorful and cheerful, which the various color schemes and environments do a great job of doing.

When I saw that Square had it on demonstration at CES, I was really excited and wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The twenty-minute demo went by like a bolt of lightning; it left me wanting more, and most definitely blew my expectations way out of the water. This summer, Quantum Conundrum may very well be a day-one purchase for Portal fans.

Do you have a Nintendo 3DS and love solving puzzles? Ubisoft just may have the game for you with its just-released Puzzler Mind Gym 3D for Nintendo’s suddenly significant handheld. Puzzler Mind Gym 3D offers daily puzzles in four different categories to give your brain a workout: Visual, Memorization, Word-based, and Numerical.

Puzzler Mind Gym 3D is essentially a 90-day program consisting of brain exercising puzzles that prepare you for the game’s Mind Gym Challenges which were whipped up by neuroscientist Professor Ian Robertson. Did I mention that he is a world expert on cognitive rehabilitation? Get ready to flex the ol’ gray matter.

Users can work their way through any of the games sessions or they can simply choose any one of the 90 programs at will by browsing through game types. Check out some of Puzzler Mind Gym 3D’s notable features:

•       Puzzler Mind Gym 3D is the first title to bring the hit “brain trainer” genre to the Nintendo 3DS, leveraging the platform’s innovative 3D technology.
•       Complete daily challenges of four puzzles and add them to your routine.
•       Monitor your improvement as the tracker automatically records your progress.
•       Get expert advice from Professor Ian Robertson as you play, providing you with useful tips on exercising the mind, both inside and outside the game.
•       As you complete challenges, learn fun trivia about the different areas of the brain and their associated functions. New on-screen 3D brain models immerse you like never before.

Can’t contain your excitement? Well, lucky you, because Puzzler Mind Gym 3D is currently available at retailers across North America for $39.99.

Catherine arrived with a lot of hype behind it. Atlus pushed it as a game with mature subject matter, like, actual mature subject matter like themes of infidelity, doubt and marriage and not just blood and boobs, though the titular character certainly provides some of that. No, a game that tackles actual human concerns comes around, oh, once every 100 years or so. Storytelling like that just isn’t done in a medium now saturated with bro-op shooters, casual dance games and motion-based gimmickry. Which might be okay, these are just games, right? And as a game, Catherine succeeds. As a story, Catherine falls short of its ambitions.

From the beginning Catherine promised a strange tale, and it is for sure. The strangest thing about it is how it fails at providing any interesting insight into relationships with women, yet does a pretty good job at depicting men who band together to overcome their insecurities and escape death. Main character Vincent, who cheats on his girlfriend Katherine with floozy Catherine and wracked by guilt, gets thrown into a nightmarish dream world every night where he has to climb a tower by pushing blocks back and forth with every night. There are other cheating men who appear as sheep in the nightmare world, and as their usual selves in the real world. I enjoyed Catherine‘s narrative the most when talking to them, learning their stories and watching them develop throughout and I got a kick out of how they swapped block-climbing techniques and eventually grew to admire Vincent — me, the player! — for his climbing prowess.

Meanwhile, the central ladies are underdeveloped and downright ghoulish at times. Physically they’re knockouts, no denying that, but they lack depth. Catherine, the sexpot who seduces main character Vincent, remains just that, an object, and a psycho with an incredibly unsatisfying resolution depending on which ending you go for — there are multiple ones depending on questions you answer in the nightmare world. Meanwhile, Katherine, Vincent’s long-time girlfriend, exhibits as much personality as wallpaper. Given her cold attitude and business-like attitude towards life in general, I don’t blame Vincent for not jumping at the chance to walk down the aisle with her. Towards the end she finally shows some emotion, but even then she never feels like a fully realized character who’s worth my care. Besides a generous cake gift she gives him, I never saw why Vincent should stay with her. Catherine‘s never as bad as past attempts to get into the mind of the fairer sex, but it did make me question whether this was made by the same team as the Persona games, which had  rich characters of both genders.

Not that the Catherine story is all bad. I was entertained all the way through, despite the stupid endgame revelations and Japanese-flavored hokey humor, a lot of which gets lost in translation. (The translation in general is a little shakey, with obvious stand-ins for Japanese ideas like “sempai” which have no English equivalent.) Catherine would have been a far better story if it was played straight and had more to say than “cheating is bad, commitment is good” and maybe even offered more possible outcomes for Vincent. Couldn’t the poor guy just be happy on his own with his friends at the bar?

As a puzzle game I was surprised how deep and addicting it can be. Each level gave me a new challenge to surmount with various ways to tackle it. Pushing and pulling blocks isn’t as easy as it sounds, as the bottom continuously falls away into the abyss and new hazards and enemies get introduced as the game goes on. It has a nice arcade feeling, similar to Tetris and the original Donkey Kong. The threat of falling keeps things moving as Vincent rushes to the top, while the block-moving  gets under your skull with its sticky, tactile feel. Similar to arcade games of yore you’ll be thinking of this game even while you’re away from it. That it manages to do so much with one simple idea impressed me.  I was also surprised how long it lasted. My save file racked up 13 or so hours, no doubt due to the tons of deaths and subsequent retries I endured. The game’s difficult, even on Easy, but never frustrating. I always wanted to give it try one more try, then one more try, then one more try … And it’s worth it, as climbing up really well offers Bayonetta-style bronze, silver and gold trophies for a good performance, as well as your usual Achievements or Trophies, and multiple endings.

Presentation-wise, Catherine has one misstep: the Twilight Zone frame intro involving the grindhouse girl with the red afro. It’s cheesy and unnecessary. I’m already playing a video game, why do I need to pretend I’m watching a made-for-TV movie? A bizarre choice. Aside from that, the animation cutscenes by Studio 4C (Street Fighter IV, Animatrix) are adequate if a little inconsistent, and the remixes of classical music that play during the nightmare segments kept the tension high, while Shoji Meguro’s jazzy original score kept me nice and relaxed during the real world bar scenes. Catherine definitely possesses one of the better soundtracks of the year. The graphics and art design are colorful and creative, as one would expect from the super-stylish Persona team.

Catherine‘s bit of a divided game. Its story could be better and it could be married to the gameplay better, but I’m not at all down on it. The game’s a great and interesting and unique one. It’s selling well, and deservedly so. Hopefully that will continue  and send a message to publishers that we want more colorful, interesting, mature games like this one.

A sheep plummeting to its death. A horned man bound to a block by barbed wire. Gender symbols swinging the distance. A woman looks in the other direction, seemingly lost in thought.

These are the surreal images that you encounter when you fire up the just-released Catherine demo.  Surely, you know the game’s gist by now: You control a 30-something named Vincent,  a man reluctant to take his relationship with his longtime girlfriend Katherine to the next level.  A sexpot also named Catherine (with a “C”) enters the scene and tempts our stand-in,  who’s been plagued with horrible, pee-in-the-bed-worthy nightmares.

The Catherine demo opens not with a cut scene explaining the action, but with a puzzle in a dreary locale named “Underground Cemetery.” The goal? To climb a block tower in a decidedly Jenga-like fashion and exit the level through a door. You rearrange blocks so that you can place them in an advantageous pattern that will allow Vincent–clad in boxers and rocking ram horns–to scale the pile.  Moving blocks can also upset the tower’s balance, but you must also be mindful of the tower’s slow erosion. If you mess up, you can press the back button to undo, an action only available when playing in “Easy” mode (the only mode available in the demo). Finding a “Mystic Pillow” grants an extra continue.

Once you clear the level, Catherine cuts to a restaurant where Vincent and Katherine discuss their relationship status. Here, the game features a silky blend of traditional hand-drawn animation and cell-shaded polygons. The cell-shaded portions make up the meat of these story-driven sections, and they look and move quite well. There’s a little stiffness here and there, but it’s no big whoop. Still, as someone raised on a steady Gundam, Macross, and MOSPEADA diet I longed for more the anime-style presentation.

Cut to the Stray Sheep diner where Vincent discusses his problems with a couple of buddies, and learns that another dude that they know, Paul, was mysteriously killed. After a couple of expletives and more relationship talk, the friends leave Vincent alone in the bar where he receives texts from Katherine. In this sequence you get to explore the decision engine. When Katherine pokes a bit about reconsidering the relationship and then questions if Vincent is at the Stray Sheep, you can help shape the game’s narrative by selecting one of several prefabricated answers. The responses (ranging from kind to snippy) affect the story’s outcome, leading you in either down a righteous or dark path. I didn’t expect this level of interaction, I didn’t get a chance to sample it at E3 2011, but it really adds to the overall story. And then there’s a hair more that I won’t go into here.

When I wrote not too long ago that Catherine brings true adult themes to video games, it was a sincere statement; a statement that’s only been reinforced by my time with the demo. Catherine, most certainly, isn’t  for everyone. It’s a remarkably odd mix of relationship melodrama, sex, and horror.  Even if it doesn’t sound like your usual cup of tea, give the demo a download; Catherine may surprise.

Oftentimes, video games that are labeled “adult” or “mature” are given such titles for limb-ripping or ta-ta ogling content. I’ve never done the former (and plead guilty to the latter), so it’s fair to conclude that such labeling is a very limited view of what constitutes adulthood. A bill- and tax-paying simulation would probably be the most universal take on being all grownsed up.

Equally as grownsed up are the complex relationships (and the accompany emotion) that frequently emerges in the adult years–particularly when it comes to dating and marriage. This is what makes Atlus Games’ Catherine such an intriguing title, and one of my most anticipated games of 2011.

Catherine is the story of Vincent, an average dude with a good core of friends and an intelligent, beautiful girlfriend of five years…Katherine (with a “K”). “Unfortunately” for Vincent, Katherine wants to settle down and get hitched; Vincent, however, is quite content in their “easy” relationship and doesn’t want to alter matters. Enter Catherine (with a “C”), a blonde sexpot who tempts Vincent, coincidentally during a wave of mysterious deaths that see young men found dead in their beds with anguished looks on their faces.

I can relate, as probably you. I’ve dated a girl who was completely right for me. I loved her deeply, moreso than any other being on this planet other than my dear old’ mama, and Vamp, my childhood pet parakeet. Scoff if you will, but that’s a lot of love. Still, I found it immeasurably difficult to keep Mr. Happy from assaulting every attractive female that ventured into my lust radius. Not that I did anything, mind you; I simply struggled with that situation. Repeatedly.

So, when I found Atlus’ E3 2011 booth, I had no qualms with waiting in a line a half hour to get my grubby paws upon it. I had to know if it indeed conveyed some of the troubles that I’ve endured as an adult. I managed to play Catherine only a handful of minutes, engaging in a mind-wrenching Intelligent Qube-like gameplay that required Vincent to move and traverse huge blocks in a nightmarish world that reflects his unraveling mind state. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up the controller (I had only seen the cutscenes until that point), but what was there was logical and entertaining. Even better, I learned that Catherine features multiple endings depending on your gameplay decisions.

That was the hook. A game based on the snake pit of twisting, intersecting lines that comprise relationships very rarely lead down one predetermined path. Matters of love have highs, lows, and numerous possible endings–like a video game.

There aren’t many titles that make you take a good look at yourself. E3 2011 drowned in a sea of shooters and sequels, so it was quite amazing to experience a title that dealt with true adult issues in an unique manner Hopefully, Catherine, with the buzz surrounding it, will help developers realize that a little risk, and a smattering of daring is sorely needed in this industry. Funny, isn’t it, that a quirky Japanese game about a cowardly, weak-willed guy appeals to me more than the uber-macho gun-toting space marine whose biggest issue is respawning in a safe location?

Catherine hits stores July 26th–as does the limited edition Love is Over Deluxe Edition. Until then, enjoy the screens.

Atlus announced a limited “deluxe edition” for pre-orders of its sexy nightmare thriller Catherine, set to come out in North America on July 26. Nicknamed “Love is Over,” the pre-order swag will include:

• A pair of polka dot boxers like the ones worn main character Vincent wears.
• Vincent’s “Empty Hearts” T-shirt.
• A pillow case decorated with an alluring image of Catherine, a nod to the pillow tucked under Vincent’s arm as he frantically races to escape the terrors that pursue him.

And to top it off, all that comes inside a collectible pizza box from Stray Sheep, a bar central to the game’s story. Additionally, a soundtrack CD with 11 remixed tracks of the game’s music and a 36-page artbook will be included. Those two items will come with standard editions of Catherine as well, which is set to come out on July 26 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 for $59.99 for the standard edition and a heftier $79.99 for the “Love Is Over” Deluxe Edition.

Bejeweled is not what I expected when I started playing Legend of Fae. With the word “fae” in the title, I expected a gentle adventure game with intrigue and a story featuring fairy mythology.

I got Bejeweled. Crammed into a ripoff Poke-verse.

Ostensibly an RPG-puzzler, Endless Fluff Games’ Legend of Fae uses Bejeweled’s “match 3 of the same color balls” puzzle system to gather magic.  There are six different colors to match and they correspond to different elementals and powers. This “mana” lets the main character and her helpers do everything from walk to fight monsters. Yes, you actually have to break balls to walk in this game.

Claudia is our main character, and she’s a young girl with a leg brace. She’s been happily apprenticed to her Uncle Monte and learning all about engineering until he suddenly disappears and leaves her a weird-looking lantern. Claudia sets out to find him, and encounters fae, elementals, and all sorts of otherworldly critters on the way.

(Note: fae are not elementals. They are fairy. They are not floating chibi blobs of color that vaguely represent elements and call themselves fae to be different. Or gremlins. Or anything else this game calls fae. Thank you.)

Turn-based RPG fight systems are inherently slow; you often take damage waiting for the turn to complete itself. Adding that slowdown to the delay caused by matching colored balls to fill up ammo made me angry. Those two slowdowns, combined with the jerky transitions between combat and puzzle solving (and the tendency of puzzle mode to stretch on into infinity, even after you’ve filled all your elemental gauges and racked up as many combos as humanly possible), made this not fun to play. Good thing the monsters are slow.

The graphics are bright and colorful, and the artwork is lovingly detailed to represent a mystical fairy world. The music is a dead-ringer for Big Fish Games’ Sally’s Spa–identical synthesizer instrumentation, eerily similar melody, calming to the point of comatose. It put me to sleep. Which was bad when monsters showed up.

Legend of Fae is more calming than traditional RPGs, and there are all sorts of accommodations for racking up combos that increase your spell meter, but the game is unbearably slow. It takes forever for a row to clear. For. Eh. Vah.  That lag, combined with the RPG combat mechanics (and random interrupting dialogue), makes Legend of Fae more frustrating that captivating. Even for an Engrish game.

Skip it unless you’re intrigued by Claudia and Uncle Monte.

Muse Games has announced that its latest  title, CreaVures, a beautifully bioluminescent platforming adventure, is available for download via Steam and the Mac App Store.

CreaVures sees players taking control of five distinct mythical creatures that have unique abilities that can be used alone or in tandem to help them solve platforming puzzles. Set in a world illuminated with beautiful fluorescents colors, CreaVures follows the tiny creatures as they journey to save their homeland by gathering essence to restore light to their dying forest. The adventure spans 17 different levels, including a pair of boss battles.

The video game is developed and published by Muse Games Corp. and is available now. For the first week, CreaVures will be 10% off the normal price of $9.99. CreaVures will also be available for the iPhone and iPad via the App Store later this spring.

If you thought Popcap Games wasn’t sucking up enough of your precious free time, think again.

Zuma Blitz, the new Facebook game / obsession-in-the-making, is Popcap’s latest entry into the puzzle game market.  Instead of matching jewels, you play a frog that shoots marbles. Two long trails of marbles snake around you into fearsome Inca skulls, and your goal is to knock out as many groups of the same color as you can in a minute. Lose too many marbles to a skull and it’s game over (the marbles – and you – get eaten up by the skull).

The challenge, as with other Popcap titles, is to master the art of efficiency. If you catch the marbles at the right part of the trail the whole row will either stop, giving you more time, or move backward, knocking out matches earlier in the row. You can even score points by shooting through a gap. The shape of the two trails changes as you progress, becoming trickier the further you get. You can right click to change the ball to the color of the one on your back – but you have to play that skipped color right afterward.

This is your menu screen. Colorful, isn't it?

You can earn (via point totals after each game) or buy spirit idols to give yourself a boost. There are also bombs, mega bombs, and all sorts of other goodies to improve your game and up your points (my favorite was the Last Hurrah because it blew up all of the marbles I didn’t have time to shoot after the time ran out. Very gratifying).  Everything has to be purchased with Facebook credits (ie, your credit card), but it is sort of nice to unlock your own personal temple of powers (idols, items and all). Sometimes you run out of life and have to flip a coin against the Grim Reaper for further turns, and it’s always fun to see him in a game.

The game has a vaguely Central American / Inca-ish look to it, all woodcuts and bright colors. Even the prompts are in colorfully broken Inca-ish English (“Is true, you still just a Whelp. No get all sad tho! Soon get bigger. Then laugh at others”).  There’s even pounding drums and chanting that sort of sounds like you’re building up to a human sacrifice.

Don’t worry: the only sacrifice here is your free time.

You heard the frog - get crackin'!

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