Shapeshifting puzzler Shift Quantum gets creative with black and white

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Join me on this unlikely kick, readers. First it was skeleton games, and now I can't escape perspective-shifting games. Last week it was Exception, a neon-lit action game about saving a grandma's PC. Today it's Shift Quantum, an intriguing puzzle game from developer Fishing Cactus with a sci-fi noire setting and a focus on altering your environment. Outright changing the shape of the world might sound counter to solving environmental puzzles, but stick with me, there's more to this.

There are still rules and limitations to follow, you just come at them a little differently. There's a positive-negative relationship between space which forces you to evaluate levels from multiple angles. The push of a button can totally invert your landscape, opening up new paths where before nothing existed.

Changing the orientation of a level also affects the objects within it. Even as a path opens up, cascading blocks may move to block it, so proper planning and precise platforming is essential to clearing levels.

The best puzzle games force you to think in a new way, and Shift Quantum looks to do just that. We'll find out for ourselves when it releases in early 2018.

Austin freelanced for PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and has been a full-time writer at PC Gamer's sister publication GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a staff writer is just a cover-up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news, the occasional feature, and as much Genshin Impact as he can get away with.