Hey Time Wasters!
This week I’m taking a look at the free game called Curiosity ‘ What’s Inside the Cube: an extremely simple game with an interesting end goal. My wife alerted me to this game after seeing it on Youtube, and with so many of this game’s pieces chipped away, I think I’m safe to say that she wasn’t the only one who took notice of it.
Curiosity is a game where the whole point is to find out what’s inside a large cube, and in order to get to the cube’s middle you have to chip away pieces of each layer by breaking them off with the poke of a finger. Each layer is made up of billions of little squares, so I’m sure you guys have guessed that in order to get passed one layer and onto the next, every one of those billions of squares must be destroyed. Luckily you’re not the only one chipping away at it though, as people from all around the world are there working on it with you.
Labeled as a social experiment, Curiosity is getting thousands of people to work together for a common purpose. What’s that purpose (other than the get to the middle part)? Well whoever is lucky enough to chip away the last square of the cube is said to receive a video link and what that person does with that video is up to them. They can keep it to themselves or share it with the world, whatever. Like I said; an interesting end goal, and one that may have too much hype since the video is said to be ‘life-changingly amazing’. I for one am not holding my breath.
But Curiosity, as interesting a concept as it is, isn’t anything spectacular. It is, after all, a box covered in squares, and that’s it. The aesthetics of the game are nice: each side of the cube is covered in a picture so that it’s more visibly appealing, when you are zoomed in there’s an arrow to tell you where more cubelets are so you won’t waste time searching for them, and with the gold you save up you can buy chisels to chip away more blocks at a time. But other than that, there’s nothing else to the game.
At least they managed to fix some issues they had upon the game’s release. Trying to get in to play at the beginning was like pulling teeth and often didn’t work as the servers were just too crowded. There was also a problem with the game hud being too large too. I cannot express the frustration of trying for several minutes to get in game only to accidentally hit the Facebook login button once in and be taken out. Needless to say, at those times, I didn’t bother trying to get back in.
But as I said, those bugs are thankfully fixed (from what I’ve experienced), so any and all casual gamers out there who have a few moments to spare can go lend their aid to the cause if you feel the urge to do so.
Curiosity ‘ What’s Inside the Cube earns 3 GiN Gems out of 5 for succeeding in making me just curious enough.