The Nintendo Wii is no stranger to odd games thanks to its motion controls, and neither is Kenji Eno, he of One-Dot Enemies fame not too long ago in this 1001 list.
On the surface, You, Me and the Cubes is a puzzle game about balancing people on cubes hanging out in the void. Underneath that surface, well, things get a little weird.
Fun Times
You, Me and the Cubes is a puzzle game with a simple concept. Each level has a certain number of cubes in play, some time on the clock for you to work with, and a number of Fallos that you need to have in the right place on the right cubes before that time runs out.
Fallos are little people that are violently shaken awake and thrown out of your Wiimote onto the surface of a cube, wherever it is that you've targetted them to land. This first level wants us to balance two Fallos on one cube within 100 seconds, which is an absolute piece of cake.
The cube hangs in the void, but moves around a bit, either between levels, or more likely as a result of your Fallos upsetting the centre of balance of the structure beneath their feet.
If a Fallos is nice and stable, it'll sit down, cross-legged, and remain in place until the end of your run, but that's not as easy to have happen as you might think. More likely is that they'll wobble around a bit, lose their footing, slide down the surface of a cube and hang onto the edge for dear life, desperately waiting and hoping for another Fallos to walk over and help them up - and thankfully, they are all kind-hearted enough to do such a thing.
Each level introduces more cubes and more Fallos are required to be on those cubes, usually a minimum of one on each cube, but more Fallos than cubes to help you balance everything out.
When it comes time to judge whether or not you've met the requirements, the view often shifts, and with it, the centre of balance, and your Fallos will probably start to slide off.
You've got an infinite amount of them, and it's really the time and your positioning of their landing spots that will be a problem to you. If they're happy, they'll sit down on the spot and remain in place, and you want this to happen. It's just so damn fiddly to get there.
At the end of your run, the number of stable Fallos are counted up and compared against the number that there probably should be, and that's another box ticked off from a grid of multiple levels, and presumably difficulty.
Frustrations
I say that because I don't know, and don't really have the interest in finding out. Knowledge of You, Me and the Cubes on the Internet is a little lacking - nobody can be bothered to create a Wikipedia entry for it, and the Nintendo Wiki entry is two sentences long.
Luckily, there are competent reviewers out there who haven't gotten bored after a few levels of what is clearly a simple little puzzle game, and they've written all sorts about how it's actually a game about life, companionship, and that by the end of it, you'll be playing against something that is made up of all the souls of the Fallos that have fallen off your cubes and into the void. My goodness, that's horrible!
But to get that far, and to see any of the other gameplay changes and twists to the basic formula, you've got to be invested in the simple act of lobbing little folks onto big cubes, and I'm not.
The controls are simple - shaking, pointing, throwing - but as soon as the Fallos are out of your Wiimote, they're on their own, and wherever I was throwing them, they're usually helpless and screaming - hardly a satisfying way think to look at in what you think is a simple little puzzler.
Final Words
I don't know quite what to think about You, Me and the Cubes. Playing it, I was more frustrated than impressed, and seeing it as nothing more than a strange puzzler gave me the impression that there'd be nothing else going on with it for level after level after level.
It wasn't until getting bored of it (quite early on) and then reading some reviews and learning that it only gets more unusual that I was a little more interested in it - but to be more interested in it meant playing more of a game that frustrated me more than it impressed me, and knowing that you face off against your failures means I'm going to have quite the challenge ahead of me.
But it's a challenge that I'm not interested in facing because the gameplay is more frustrating than inter- have you gotten it yet? I'm not interested enough to play this interesting, twisted puzzler.
You might be. You might love the idea of balancing little people on big cubes, in which case you might want to track down You, Me and the Cubes. I don't. It's a bit of a faff, and I don't think there's enough of a compelling reason for me to try and work through it.
Fun Facts
Yeah, I don't know much about this one. There are some rogue Pale Fallos that roam around your cubes and disrupt the balance later on. Is that enough to get me to try it? Nope. Sounds even more frustrating to me.
You, Me and the Cubes, developed by Fyto, first released in 2009.
Version played: Nintendo WiiWare, 2009, via emulation.