Developer/Publisher: Rotateam
Release Date(s): Mar 4, 2015
Genre(s): Puzzle, Indie
Platform(s): Windows
Language(s): English, French
Pricing: $7.99 | £5.59 | €7,99
Rating: Not rated
Rotateam’s first downloadable title, named Ubinota, is a 3D cube puzzle game focused on holding together cloud clusters made of nothing else but cubes. With many similar indie games that use an orbiting camera perspective in puzzle games, does Ubinota have any unique features that hold this Rotateam's premiere title above the rest?
Tale of the cloud painters
The game throws you into the world of Lucien, a painter who is instructed by the city’s magus to repaint all of the cloud surfaces to keep them from tearing apart. It is apparent early on that these people depend on the paint to keep their homes from falling away…and that Lucien is very hungry, to the point of even wanting to eat his own paint. So once you finish helping your neighbors, you move on to other cloud worlds and repeat the same process, meeting other minor characters to engage with.
Nevertheless, the magus is always making you paint and Lucien is always hungry, which can really get redundant, making even the slightest aside joke not as enjoyable as it could have been. It gives some depth to the people you see often, but otherwise the story is too shallow in showing only brief episodes of events, never going into much detail about the universe or showing any character growth in Lucien. Basically, the game is intended to be a children's storybook.
Gameplay
Viewing the scene from every angle can be difficult with bigger or clustered levels, but it is still easy to figure out the positions of cubes from anywhere with enough adjusting. Clicking on each individual cube to paint it is precise, and tutorial levels are simple and straightforward for learning the basics. There are a total of six colors with different attributes, from basic gluing, to flying, to elasticity, but it becomes clear from early levels that not every bit of paint is necessary to finish some of them. This freedom of puzzle solving is well appreciated until the player has to figure out that there is sometimes only one solution to the problem. In this sense, some levels feel intuitive, while others keep you guessing, with no clues or help from the game.
The disappointing aspects of the game come with two other unexplained factors: the cube physics and the level resetting. Most of the time, cubes will fall directly downwards when free from paint and account for collisions appropriately, except when cubes stack or float. This can be frustrating, as just missing one painted surface can make or break some puzzles. Once you realize you have messed up the cube structure, it forces you into repainting all of the surfaces again, which can be a lot when combined with the amount of colors you can possibly paint with. Loading each level feels okay as the screen fades in and out, but this becomes boring, since the player has to select each one to load instead of playing them back to back.
Cloud paintings
The actual levels are very interesting to view, with the simplistic art style of the characters and cubes. Each world’s skybox is very colorful and unique, in contrast to the hand-drawn images that appear frequently on the cubes, which can easily become disinteresting.
Sounds in the clouds
The soundtrack is very serene, making for a calming gameplay mood, the over-world is peaceful, and the narration is playful and charming just and the story intends. The minor noisy voice interruptions of the characters during narration are as strange as they are subtle, but they do make the story a little more personable than imaginary. Even with such little variety, the looping music does not stale, as it meshes with the gameplay setting very well.
Content/Difficulty
Most achievements are based on mastering the controls and completing levels of the game, so the players should not have trouble earning most of these. Although most of the levels in each world feel similar in design, the ability to choose to complete only a few is a nice way to help you progress through the main game. There is a good amount of single-player content revisiting the game content and making sure players understand, and when combined with the issues mentioned above, it can make fully completing this game long and tedious, regardless of a player’s comprehension levels. Still, it is very much possible to complete every level if you put enough time into it. Sometimes, it's possible to successfully test a level's structure, when the player can see that it would eventually fail, making it a bit confusing to tell how to solve some puzzles.
