Q.U.B.E: Director's Cut

Q.U.B.E: Director's Cut

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Trying to unravel the story [Spoilers]
WARNING, SPOILERS AHEAD
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

The two narrators in the game present two opposing views about the Qube, and in the end, the one that makes the least sense seems to be the definitive answer. But is that really true?

Let's look at both possible scenarios. Option 1, the astronaut inside the ISS is right and the Qube is an alien structure heading toward Earth. Option 2, 919 is right and the player is held captive amd forced to solve puzzles. Neither of these options can explain everything, so let's look at each one and list the facts that don't quite line up with it.

Option 1: Alien Spacecraft
1. The player wakes up inside the cube without any sort of entrance nearby. How would they have entered the cube?
2. Why did she call it deep space travel if the Qube was shown to be near the moon in the final scene?
3. Why would aliens build a spacecraft consisting entirely of puzzles? Not to mention that the symbols (arrows, play button) are understandable for a human.
4. Why is nobody except for the player inside the Qube?
5. Why are there escape pods if the Qube is unmanned?
6. Why is the Qube supposedly breaking apart if nothing is shown to be happening in the final scene?
7. How would incapacitating the Qube stop it from destroying Earth? Its direction or speed would not have changed.
8. Why is there gravity inside the Qube?
9. How would a suit create all the nutrients needed for human survival out of light? Not to mention where the excrements would go for Jonathan Burns. His box would have to be filled with it.
10. If Jonathan Burns survived because of his suit, there must be light grtting into his box. But if there was light,he wouldn't be trapped in the dark like he says and he would be able to see the outside and realize that he is in space.
11. Jonathan would also have to notice that there is no gravity, and as such he couldn't be underground.
12. Why does the player's life suit have the ability to move the blocks?
13. Why did they send a single person to dismantle an alien spacecraft from the inside? How would they even know that there wouldn't be any aliens inside that would kill the intruser and that the Qube can be destroyed from the inside?
14. Why would the player be unconscious for two weeks? What would've caused the amnesia?
15. If the player's video transmission was broken, how would the narrator know that there are escape pods?

Option 2: Underground Testing Facility
1. What is being tested? The player's equipment? The puzzles themselves?
2. Why would the testers build such a giant facility and break it?
If the testers have the ability to erase someone's memory, why would they want to kill the test subjects if they could just erase their memory?
3. How would they build things such as the magnetic puzzles that ignore gravity, the light beams, the puzzles that require the player to pick up spheres of light, and the balls and transparent blocks that can be walked through?
4. Why would the other voices keep telling lies when the player is already inside the shuttle flying toward their death without any option to return?
5. Why would the testers pretend the player's video transmission is broken?
6. What box is 919 in, how did he get there, and where did he get the equipment to communicate with the player?

As you can see, option 1 has far more contradictions than option 2, which makes me believe that 919 is actually right and the ending scene is what the testers want the player to believe. Considering that most contradictions in option 2 are simply things we don't know, it is far more likely than option 1, whose contradictions simply don't make any sense. And since the testers would be so good at faking things, they could've easily faked the ending scene too, for example by replacing the windows in the escape pod with screens.

That is only my opinion though. Let me know what you think, and please tell me if I've missed any more contradictions!
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Showing 1-3 of 3 comments
Gaboris 18 Nov, 2015 @ 3:50pm 
I just finished this game yesterday and thought I'd take a look at some story conversations.
The story itself did leave a LOT of things unanswered, but in these cases I'm pretty swift to fill all the plot holes with basic logic without questioning the end idea too much so let's see if someone else has the same thoughts as me. :)

Personally I support the spacecraft theory even though the ending was SO corny that I kept facepalming myself while laughing. XD

1-2-13-14.
The "inside without an opening", "2 weeks coma" and "singel person" parts for me meant that the so called "deep space" travel was some form of teleportation since there was no mention of a spacecraft and maybe it only has capacity for one person.
Basically they were able to teleport us into the QUBE ship, but since this teleport may knock one out for several days2 weeks in our case we woke up only a few hours before the ship hits Earth.

6.
??? Didn't you see all the qubes floating around in space and the big burning holes on the ship's sides? I'd say that thing was falling appart all right. :P

7-8.
Everything with a mass has gravity so the sheer size of that ship should give it it's own gravity, but even that wouldn't explain why it seems to mach Earth's so I'd say since those magnets seem to influence gravity itself there must be actual blocks that can create artificial gravity to help keep the ship itself intact.
On the ending screens I didn't see any thrusters on the ship so I think it might use some completely different method of propulsion that doesn't cause any momentum so the moment the "engine" stops the ship also stops on the spot.

3-4-5.
Yeah these parts require a lot of "let's say space" sooo...
Let's say the ship is unmannedexcept for those mechanical balls that sometimes seem to be somewhat sentient because the bloksmost of them not the ones that seems to be made of something solid and tied together by cables themselves are some form of artificial robots that form bigger structures if they combinethink Replicators from Stargate or a more advanced form of m-blocks.
Also let's say that the ship has all those useless parts like "escape pods", "puzzles" and "human signs" because the blocks based it on a human ship. Say a ship that went MISSING many years ago. With a human who's mind might've been scanned to find a new destination/goal.
Same with the meanings of the signs that might be from John's mind and as a human's mind tends to try and entertain itself if bored maybe he was able to influence the layout while scanned and thus ended up filling it up with a lot of "useless" rooms while trying to entertain himself.

9-10-11.
These are somewhat based on my previous theories so let's say those are correct.
Since the settings must be in the futureteleporting and such it could be said that they created a special plant/fungus/bacteria that can create ALL the needed nutrients a person needs to survive just from light and some "material"like those gels that plant saplings are put in so they can grow within a jar, or human "byproducts".
Even if we give logic a big stretch this shouldn't work for too long, but they DO admit that it shouldn't have kept him alive so long so this supports that the guy was found by the qubes and kept alive.
Based on all this, several years of captivity, brain scans and living off of a suit made nutrient paste I'd say John went crazy and just can't recognize that he isn't locked in a dark box.

12-15.
These two need such a huge stretch of disbelief that even I doubt them, but the best explanation is that Earth knew about the QUBE ship or at least the workings of the qubes for years before this and set up a plan to stop the ship once it targeted us.
So basically they knew how the qubes work and were able to build an "interface" into the suit that could manipulate themhence she said that she hopes we "still know what to do", they were able to learn the layout of the ship, see the pods, track our position on the ship and target a teleporting location from where we can reak havoc till we get out.

Okay so this is how I explained all the technical details. Please do share your own thoughts or ideas. :D
Spice 19 Mar, 2016 @ 1:30pm 
This game's story messed me up, it's so "Not Right" that it feels faked, like maybe the testers HAD faked the ending scene.... grhhh
Skissors_ 20 Jun, 2020 @ 11:15am 
For me, three things we learn right at the start of the game broke the story for me:

1) Somehow we're out of range of the Deep Space Network but not the ISS, which is only ~300 miles above Earth? But the Moon, our closest celestial body, is nearly 1,000 times farther away, and our character is supposedly much much farther, somewhere out in "deep space". We could be billions of miles away for all we know, so 300 miles is nothing in comparison.

2) The ISS seems to only able to talk to us for a couple minutes at a time, then is blocked by Earth for a dozen minutes. In reality, it takes the ISS about 90 minutes to orbit Earth. So at minimum, it should be possible to receive 30 minutes of communication at a time, describing who we are, what the mission is, why we're alone, how we got here in the first place, what the status/ETA of the qube is, maybe even work out a way to manipulate whatever sensor data our suit is sending back so we can communicate both ways?

3) An entire planet at stake, and it's fate is left up to a single man? It seemed quite clear they knew the trip to the qube would wipe our memory at best, kill us at worst, yet they only sent one person? Then they just waited two weeks for us to wake up? The important things we send into the sky usually have built in backups and redundancies, so that if one systems fails, it can return home for repairs instead of being destroyed in a crash. So either Earth scientists were just this desperate, or they somehow knew our character would save the day.
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