The player character is equipped with special gloves that can perform a number of functions on specific blocks to reach the exit.

The game employs a sterile monochromatic environment that highlights the coloured blocks that the player can interact with, and has been compared to the Portal series.

[1] The player's character, after waking up from some incident, finds himself with a pair of gloves that can interact with specific blocks that are in the walls, floors, and ceilings of the various rooms as he progresses.

In the early stages, the player's goal is to use a combination of these blocks to get themselves to an exit point, allowing them to move to the next chamber.

[4] Waking inside a sterile, cube patterned environment, the player finds themselves wearing a special suit with unique gloves, and is contacted over radio by a woman named Commander Nowak.

represents the final student project of Daniel Da Rocha, Jonathan Savery and Dave Hall, at Newport University.

During this initial period of development, the team had considered the difficulty of obtaining publishing deals given their inexperience in the field, but instead happened upon funding provided by the Indie Fund, based on the potential of their game, allowing them to work at a more relaxed pace while retaining the intellectual property for themselves.

Aaron Isaksen of the Indie Fund noted that they were drawn to the project while it was still a student project, believing the first-person puzzle game offered new concepts and ideas while providing a clean and simple interface without any time pressure or pin-point accuracy for the player.

[8] None of the Toxic Games team members are programmers: Hall noted that at no time during the development did they have to work directly with programming source code, and Q.U.B.E.

Some elements of this narration remain in the released product, such as a room where the walls attempt to crush the player to create a sense of claustrophobia.

In addition, the game features ten new levels for speedrun trials, a new musical score, and support for the virtual reality Oculus Rift headset.

was one of the twelve finalists, but did not win, for the 2011 Indie Game Challenge sponsored by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.

[4] The presentation of the new gameplay elements was considered to be well-done, providing a gentle introduction for each before culminating into a larger puzzle.

[2][3][4] Reviews also noted that the physics of some of the objects like balls and blocks were strange to the point of being manipulated by the game to assure completion of certain puzzles instead of allowing for unlucky bounces that would happen in real life.

[21] The player takes the role of Amelia Cross, a British archeologist who awakes in an abstract space, and is guided by another entity, Emma, on solving puzzles to help her escape.