Yesterday, a post by @two turned my attention to Kenny Sun's "Kubrix," an ad-supported abstract puzzle game for smartphones.
I don't want to spoil it, but there's a bit more to this game than it lets on, and it's hiding in plain sight. Don't be afraid to spend your hints. The way it uses ads is something I haven’t seen before.
This game really is the culmination of the knowledge, experience, insight, judgment, and wisdom of Stanley Kubrix, American hero.
(Unfortunately, it looks like it's iOS only right now, you might be able to find an APK for Android devices, but the most recent evidence I can find of the Google Play listing existing was from June of this year)
Hints/walkthrough
Hint 1
Hint 2
Hint 3
Hint 4
Hint 5
Hint 6
Walkthrough
The Gamecenter achievements and leaderboard categories (and more overtly, the fact that Kittens Game is cited as an influence in the credits, if you were to look there) hint at the true nature of the game.
Kubrix is secretly a clicker game.
Once past level 2, go to the hint menu and notice the upgrade button next to the close button. Buying upgrades in this menu dramatically increases the rewards you get from doing stuff in the game.
At first, watching ads is the most efficient way to get hints/knowledge, but soon you’ll be gaining hundreds of hints with each brick turned, and thousands from each level completed, and you’ll eventually gain the ability to excise the ads from the game entirely.
The game is very linear once you know what the real goal is, just keep upgrading stuff until you’re getting tons of hints/knowledge, and eventually outsource the hint generation and upgrade buying to automation.
Some easy to miss things:
- Once you have the ability to automatically buy upgrades, you need to manually turn on the auto-upgrader for each type of upgrade you want to be purchased.
- The game’s speed is dictated by its framerate in some places, turn off battery saver mode to speed the game up.
Once you’ve accumulated 10 wisdom, press the “search” button next to the wisdom counter in the hint menu to trigger the ending.
Ending recording
Spoiler discussion
Outside of a level from "Hidden My Game By Mom!", I don't think I've seen many other games use their banner/video ads as part of a puzzle though! This feels like a pretty unique way to get some pennies from ads, though I might be a little less excited about the game if figuring out its true nature didn't eventually unlock the ability to permanently remove the ads.
The puzzle game is also a decent timewaster in the same vein as Yankai's Triangle, which also probably has me landing on a more positive note than if it had just been the part I'm talking about in this post. I still played the shit out of that back in high school, and afaik there wasn’t anything like this to discover, just elevating levels of discomfort from its audio and visuals.
