Shift Quantum
Axon Vertigo, the world's leading authority and most trusted friend in cerebral contentedness programming, promises to deliver better life quality for everyone with the Shift Quantum program. Connected to the cyber-noir action-puzzle platformer, you will be tasked to solve puzzles and create negative space by inverting the world to transform barriers into escape routes. Shift the world, twist your environment, bend your mind to unveil its secrets and solve each brain-drilling level . Make use of all special gameplay blocks to overcome obstacles and get to the exit to find the happiness you have been searching for and promised by Axon Vertigo. Join Axon Vertigo's Level Editor for the Shift Quantum program to create your own custom levels and publish them to the community to get played, rated and featured. Don't limit your challenges, challenge your limits.
Game Discussion
Steam User 0
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.