Shift Quantum

Keep in mind this review is written before completely finishing the game (I'm about 2/3 of the way through).

Do recommend, this is a well-designed little puzzle game. The puzzles build on each other well and solving them feels fulfilling. It's exactly what I was looking for in a brain teaser game.

However, there's a couple of things that are making it really frustrating to play in places. First, I can't zoom out, which in early levels is fine, but in later maps leads to frustration as I am often stuck trying to navigate towards a goal that I can't see, using a device where I have to reset the level if I'm one block left or right of the goal. It feels tedious to have entirely solved a problem, but have to reset and redo it all because of this.

Second, on a similar note, though not on the same level of frustration, the inability to see how many levels are left intuitively on the map screen. I'm often finding myself wanting to move to map nodes that I haven't seen yet (even if they'd be locked and inaccessible!) in order to get a visual representation of how far I've come and how far I'm going. The percentage completion at the top of the screen is good, but it's really not as intuitive, and I find myself missing the ability to visually see at a glance how far I've come and exactly what's on the roadmap going forward.

As an aside, the bonus goals on each level, the 'glitches' aren't always well integrated. There are some puzzles where it's an extra level of puzzling to figure out how to get the glitch without putting yourself in a bad position and being unable to get to the exit of the level. However, these are only a handful of levels, and the rest of the time, the glitches tend to be either trivial or they're just an exercise in platforming execution, which doesn't feel like it adds a lot to the game.

So overall, do recommend: 90% of the time, the puzzles are really well designed and fun to solve, and I love the switching in and out gimmick of the game. But there are definitely a few things that hold it back from being an A+ experience.

A challenging and mystifying addition to the always excellent Shift series! While you have the usual Shift mechanic (swap to the opposite side of reality so up is down, black is white, walls and floors are now open space and vice-versa, etc.), they've added pushable blocks that follow the same rules (blocks that are floors and walls in one shift perspective are now open space in the opposite shift perspective). Combine that with shifting gravity (everything falls one specific direction, even if the player has turned their personal gravity another direction) and the regular addition of new types of blocks with unique abilities, and you have a recipe for crazy complicated puzzles. On top of that, they add even more excellent Trap mechanics for bonus puzzles after you beat the main game! (Want to push this block? Too bad! It has spikes on multiple sides!) All in all, a very solid puzzle game that shouldn't drive you crazy with "impossible" puzzles.

There's also a confusing story being told intermittently through cutscene puzzle levels involving chasing after / working with a little girl. Even with the additional story details being provided as flavor text through the achievements, I still have no idea who this girl is supposed to be. I'm also not certain if the corporation that has the player going through Shift puzzles is actually evil or if their therapy pitch is legit... Honestly, that's probably what the dev was going for. It's like the movie Inception - what actually happened at the end of the movie is up to the viewer to decide.

My only regret is that the servers for community levels (as well as the game website) are down. You're not going to be able to get every achievement on this game if that matters to you... I was personally just hoping to try out tricky levels from other players. You can at least still see some of the in-universe corporate technobabble through the Internet Archive, but the website is partially broken there too.

Nice puzzle game with a novel mechanism. Not too mind-bending as of halfway through the game, so good for a relaxing session.