Parent's Guide: Quantum Conundrum - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

A physics based puzzle game, Quantum Conundrum sees you playing as a young child, who's sent to stay with their crazy scientist uncle, Professor Fitz Quadwrangle in his scientific laborat..er... mansion. Upon arriving, poor Prof. Quadwrangle ends up making a mistake in one of his experiments, which leaves him trapped in an alternate dimension - and it's up to you, with the help of your dimension shifting glove, to help get him out.

Rather than letting you jump between dimensions where everything's entirely different, though, the glove instead simply changes the properties of the objects in the room you're in - whether it's the fluffy dimension, which makes things lighter, letting you lift heavy safes with ease, or the slow dimension, which slows time for every object in the room - bar yourself.

It's up to you to switch between these various dimensions (out of a total of four on offer) in order to solve a number of puzzles in each of the rooms of the mansion. Whether you're switching to the fluffy dimensions to lift a safe, hurling it at some glass, and then switching back to the normal dimensions, to give it some weight so it can smash straight through, or slowing time so you can leap across a collapsing platform, each puzzle requires a lot of logic, planning, and foresight.

And it's this that's part of the reason why we went with a fairly high age rating. Quantum Conundrum is a strange mix of a slow paced, logic based puzzle game, where you have to scout every room out, and think long and hard about how you're going to get from A to B, combined with a need for fast reactions, as seen in many first person shooters. It can be fiendishly difficult at times, with lasers that zap you if you stand in their way for more than a second, and an over reliance on first person platforming, which asks you to judge pixel-perfect leaps without being able to see your feet. At times, it can all be rather tricky, even for us - but it's a lot harder to judge how a child would cope. We know there's going to be children who'll be fine with figuring out the puzzles, but may not have the dual analogue precision required to make it from A to B in time, and there'll be children who'll be fine with both. As is often the way, a lot depends on the child themselves - but if your child's fond of first person games, and you're looking for a game that'll encourage them to use their reasoning and logic, this is a good place to start.

With no violence, swearing or sexual references, there's nothing in the way of mature content in Quantum Conundrum.

Sadly, Quantum Conundrum is an entirely single player game - although parents can easily get involved with their child's game by helping out with some of the more challenging puzzles.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Xbox 360