Target Audience: Puzzle solvers, Ages 15 and up (light violent imagery and jumpscares)
Game: Cube Escape: Paradox
Creator: Rusty Lake
Platform: Mac (Steam)
Cube Escape: Paradox, is an immersive puzzle game that puts players in a haunting room where your character has no memory of entering the room, or even of who he is. The controls of the game are very simple, being a point and click style experience, but the puzzles are anything but. The puzzles gradually increase in difficulty and surrealism. The story is not just woven into these puzzles, the story IS the puzzles. You uncover information about the murder of a woman, Laura Vanderboom, through the completion of creepy, even frightening puzzles and challenges. 
The title of the series: Cube Escape, very clearly captures the setting of the game. Unlike other mystery games or walking simulators that rely heavily on environmental storytelling through dialogue or found objects, Paradox constructs its mystery through the changing and altering of items in a confined space. Every item: the dresser, the clock, the typewriter, the mirror, and even the plant, all serve a purpose in the puzzles and attempted escape from the room. These four walls, for nearly 90% of the game, is the sole space the player inhabits. The items in the room constantly shift and reconfigure themselves after their use in a puzzle has been fulfilled, unlocking a memory fragment or clue as to where the next puzzle resides. Paradox requires the player to actively alter the space itself to uncover the meaning of the mystery. I found myself emptying bottles, burning pieces of paper to reveal secret messages, and even tearing up the floorboards of the room.
The architecture of the game is both literal and metaphoric. The cube that is revealed at the end of the game after you have completed every puzzle is a metaphor for the memory entrapment that your character experienced as well as representing the literal shape of the room that the game takes place in. The cube rising from the lake in the final scene I found to be a very artistically pleasing finale for the experience.
There were two moments in my playthrough, however, that significantly disrupted this narrative flow. The first involved the map puzzle, where the only clues that were given to how to create the correct route were given by a small “first person” view of the path in the bottom right corner. While I enjoyed that the game had previously been letting me figure out the puzzles and interaction mechanisms before this point, I would have preferred a bit more guidance in this area. The second was finding the correct placement of some cube collectables that I had been accumulating as puzzle rewards over the course of the game. I could not, for the life of me, figure out where I was supposed to place these collectables in order to advance to the next puzzle. In order to progress past both of these points, I regrettably had to consult an online walkthrough guide. Both of these instances were points where I found that the surrealism and minimal instructions were impeding the logical progression rather than enhancing it.
Ethical Reflection
While Paradox succeeds in building a wonderful narrative space, it does sacrifice some accessibility. The game often relies on the ability to see distinct items or remember sequences of numbers, words, or patterns, all while providing no adjustable color contrast or other visual adjustment settings. Puzzles that require distinguishing colors, or moving blurry black shapes around the screen to align with objects in the room (an example of one such puzzle featured in Paradox), would become increasingly more difficult for players with visual impairments. The choice to prioritize artistic minimalism and retaining a defined style does is not independent of these accessibility features; a simple “colorblind filter” that could be applied to the game would allow these players to experience the same fun puzzle that I did without sacrificing the art style. Additionally, allowing for a screen reader toggle would also make the game more accessible. There are many puzzles in the game that require reading or memorization of symbols, and is currently completely inaccessible to players who would have difficulty in seeing said symbols.
