Survive! Mr. Cube
Nintendo Switch

In this rogue-lite adventure, Survive! Mr. Cube on the Nintendo Switch tells the story of Mr. Kobe. He leads a normal, non-eventful life and is set to marry the woman he loves. One night, at a local pub, a mysterious stranger approaches and offers a pill to Mr. Kobe. The genius that he is, Kobe takes the pill, finding himself in an alternate dimension the next time he wakes up. Filled with ravenous creatures, Mr. Kobe must write his own story and escape this strange land back to the world he knows and the woman he loves.

The game starts you off in a central area that appears to be a cave. You wake up and adjust to your situation while the game teaches you the controls, which use a twin-stick style of combat. The left stick moves you around while you attack in whichever direction the right stick is facing. Once you get this down, you’ll step through a portal and enter the real game.

Levels are progressively generated, and the goal is simple. Find a tower to destroy, which contains another portal that travels you to the next level. Rinse and repeat until you either make your way to the end, or fight til your last breath and need to restart from the beginning again. While pushing through the levels, you’ll engage in combat with any number of enemies like spiders, wolves, goblins. Other cube-shaped people will appear occasionally, and they’ll be marked as slightly tougher than the generic enemies by a glowing red circle on the ground around them.

While the gameplay itself in Survive! Mr. Cube is really great, it’s everything else that just loses the magic touch. So many things go unexplained throughout the game and you have to accept them as “they just are”. Other things aren’t explained until you complete the game, so if you’re not one to play this style of game frequently, you’ll be getting more questions than answers.

For example, each time you die out in one of the levels and are forced back to the start, you come in as a different character. There’s a decent cast of these that you’ll be forced to play as throughout, but the confusing thing is how different they are. Your strength and abilities aren’t determined by things you find, they can be heavily persuaded by which character your playing as. One may have a ton of health, while another will have extra powerful attacks. It just seems silly to include such vast differences without giving the player a choice in their character, rather it’s left up to luck of the draw.

Overall, the game can be quite fun. When you die, you’ll still hold onto any coins you had, which are picked up by finding treasure chests and defeating enemies. Furthermore, there is a mage in the opening cave where you can purchase items before you set out. He can drop some pretty useful stuff, but it’s all completely random so you run the risk of dumping a lot of coin for generic items you’ll find naturally as you play.

There are some things that could have been done differently and made this game so much better. However, as is? This game is still playable, and quite fun at that. So definitely give it a go because who knows, there’s always patches to fix things right?