Quantum Conundrum is a first-person puzzle platformer hybrid from one of the creators of Portal. The player takes the role of a young child visiting their scientist uncle's mansion, and must face puzzle after puzzle when an experiment goes not-so-surprisingly wrong.
Style
The visual style and general atmosphere of the game reminded me of the Ratchet and Clank games, with a similar Saturday morning cartoon look and sense of humor. I found the game to be cute or charming at times, but never to the point where I felt invested in the setting or characters.
Without going in to spoilers, the story for the game is quite shallow, and the ending VERY abrupt and unsatisfactory. With two upcoming DLC packs on the way, it feels like the base game may not be the "whole" game.
Gameplay
The gameplay consists of breaking the rules of physics in interesting ways using a power glove invented by your uncle. The glove is a control device for an invention that is distributed through-out the mansion, that allows the player to "slip between dimensions" that mirror our own, but with different properties. Effectively, the glove allows the player to change the laws of physics local to each puzzle room as allowed by the power batteries in that room.
The game's greatest flaw comes from the powers at the player's disposal. While the game clearly modeled after Portal, the Valve design philosophy is not present here, which leads to some frustrating gameplay scenarios. The powers given to the player are mostly useful in situations that require quick reflexes, which feels like the antithesis of a puzzle game. There is a high level of lethality to the fail-states of some rooms, with lasers or goo that instantly kill the player if touched.
The puzzle solving aspect is often uneven, swinging from obvious to baffling from room to room. Each room (test chamber) has a name and sometimes the solution to a room is given before you have even seen it, as a pun in that name. Other times the narrator (your uncle) will more or less tell you what you are supposed to do over and over until you do it.
Most of the challenge in this game comes not from the puzzle solving but from the platforming. The solution to most areas require quick, accurate dimension shifts during first-person jumping puzzles.
During my time with this game, it was often the case that I had mentally 'solved' the puzzle in a room, but had to take several tries to successfully enact the solution, each time having to run back to the start of the room, or be forced to wait for the things to 'reset', and listen to Q tell me what to do or when to jump. This meant that any satisfaction of solving a puzzle was often deflated by my inability to meet the twitch gameplay skill needed to enact it.
Conclusion
In closing, I found the game to be harmless fun at its best, and a chore at its worst. With a length of about 3 or 4 hours to complete in the first sitting, it didn't overstay it's welcome. There is a set of collectable items I didn't complete, and some challenge goals (don't die, speed runs, minimize power use) for each room, but I have no interest in going back to complete them.
It's not a bad game, but it is flawed.