Cube Color

Cube Color is an action-packed, real-time video game developed and published by Laush Studio for Windows PCs. Built on the Unity engine, players engage in direct control of a cube in a diagonal-down perspective. The game features both single-player and multiplayer modes, blending action and sports elements into its fast-paced gameplay.

Cube Color: A Study in Obscurity and Simplicity

In the vast, ever-expanding universe of video games, where blockbuster titles command global attention and indie darlings capture hearts with their innovation, there exists a stratum of games so simple, so unassuming, that they risk fading into the digital ether the moment they are released. Cube Color, a 2017 release from the enigmatic Laush Studio, is one such title. It is not a game that redefined genres, sparked cultural conversations, or left an indelible mark on the medium. Instead, it serves as a fascinating case study of the ultra-niche, budget-tier gaming experience that flourished on platforms like Steam in the late 2010s—a minimalist territorial conquest game that is as straightforward as its name suggests.

Development History & Context

The Studio and The Vision
Laush Studio remains one of the gaming industry’s most shadowy entities. With no public-facing developers, no prior credits, and no discernible digital footprint beyond Cube Color, the studio exists only as a name on a Steam store page. This anonymity is perhaps the most telling aspect of the game’s development. In an era defined by accessible game engines like Unity—which Cube Color is built upon—a small team or even a solo developer could conceptualize, build, and publish a game with minimal overhead.

The vision for Cube Color, as gleaned from its official description, is one of pure, unadulterated simplicity: “repaint more territory in the color of your cube.” There is no pretense of a deeper artistic statement or a complex mechanical innovation. It is a game built around a single, core mechanic, harkening back to the abstract, high-score chasing arcade games of the early 1980s, but without the cultural context or technical constraints that made those titles revolutionary. Released on November 22, 2017, it entered a marketplace saturated with similar low-cost, high-concept indie experiments.

The Technological and Market Landscape
Built in Unity, Cube Color leveraged the engine’s capabilities to create a basic 3D environment with minimal graphical fuss. Its system requirements are a testament to its lightweight nature, asking for only a GeForce 9600 GT, 1GB of RAM, and 500MB of storage—specifications that were over a decade old at the time of its release. This was not a game pushing technological boundaries; it was a game that could run on virtually any Windows machine, ensuring accessibility at the cost of visual ambition.

Its release price of $2.49 (often discounted by 90% to a mere $0.24) placed it firmly in the “impulse buy” category. This pricing strategy targeted a specific segment of the Steam audience: players looking for a quick, cheap distraction, completionists hunting for easy achievements, or those curious enough to spend less than the price of a candy bar. It existed alongside countless other Unity-made curiosities, vying for attention in a storefront where discoverability was, and remains, a monumental challenge for small releases.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

The Plot: A Vacuum of Context
To analyze the narrative of Cube Color is to confront a profound emptiness. The game offers no story, no characters, and no dialogue. The provided source material from its Steam page sets the stage with a single, intriguingly absurd line: “Compete against computer or friends who will take over the earth.”

This is the entirety of its narrative premise. There is no explanation for why sentient cubes are engaged in a territorial dispute. There is no lore behind the “4 locations” mentioned in the features list. The “earth” being taken over is presented as a blank slate, a geometric playspace devoid of cities, people, or history. The narrative is not minimalist; it is absent. Any sense of conflict or purpose is generated purely by the player’s engagement with the mechanical goal. The theme is one of abstract competition, a digital manifestation of the childhood game of claiming the biggest section of the carpet.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

The Core Loop: Purity and Repetition
Cube Color‘s gameplay is its entire reason for being, and it can be described in a single sentence: players control a cube, moving it across a flat plane to convert neutral or enemy-colored tiles to their own color.

• Control and Movement: The game utilizes a “direct control” scheme from a “diagonal-down” perspective, a fixed isometric-like view common in arcade games. Movement is simplistic, likely using keyboard inputs (WSAD or arrow keys) to navigate the grid-based or free-movement arena.
• The “Combat”: There is no traditional combat. The core interaction is one of presence. By moving over a tile, the player claims it. Encounters with AI or human-controlled opponent cubes are resolved through territorial dominance; the cube that claims the most ground and strategically boxes in the other wins. The official description hints at this: “who will take over the earth.”
• Progression and Systems: The game features no character progression, skill trees, or unlockable abilities. Any sense of progression is tied to the player’s own improving skill in outmaneuvering opponents and the binary outcome of winning or losing a match. The “Quick achievement” feature listed refers to its three Steam Achievements, which community discussions reveal can be unlocked in under five minutes, further emphasizing its lack of systemic depth.
• Multiplayer: A key advertised feature is local multiplayer “for one keyboard.” This suggests a shared-screen experience where two players compete on the same device, a throwback to couch competitive games but with severely limited scope.
• Flaws and Innovation: The game’s primary flaw is its lack of depth and content. With only four maps and one game mode, the experience is exhausted extremely quickly. Steam community discussions highlight issues like a camera “way too zoomed in,” limiting strategic oversight. Its “innovation” is non-existent; it is a bare-bones implementation of a territory-control concept seen in everything from the classic Snake to more modern titles like Fragile Allegiance or the Blob series, which a community member directly references.

World-Building, Art & Sound

A Sterile Playground
The world of Cube Color is its four arenas. Descriptions from screenshots hint at locales like “Ship,” but the provided MobyGames and Steam data suggest these are less fleshed-out “worlds” and more simply different-shaped playfields—a square, a circle, etc.—with different boundary layouts.

The art direction is minimalist to the extreme. The visual composition consists of:
* The Cubes: Player-controlled entities are likely simple, colored 3D cubes.
* The Plane: The “earth” is a flat surface, presumably textured with a basic pattern or a solid color that changes as it is claimed.
* The Arena: Basic environmental geometry to define the boundaries of the play space.

There is no atmospheric detail, no background, no visual storytelling. The sound design is similarly basic, described in the features list only as “nice sound,” which likely amounts to a few generic sound effects for claiming tiles and a short, looping background music track.

These elements contribute to an experience that is purely functional. The art and sound exist only to facilitate the mechanic, not to immerse, awe, or emotionally engage the player. It is a digital board game, and its presentation is that of a prototype rather than a finished product.

Reception & Legacy

Critical and Commercial Silence
The most telling data point for Cube Color‘s reception is the profound silence that surrounds it. As of the provided source material:
* Critic Reviews: MobyGames lists zero critic reviews. Metacritic has no page with scored reviews. The game effectively did not exist for the gaming press.
* Player Reception: On Steam, it garnered a “Mostly Positive” rating based on a minuscule sample size of only 19 user reviews. These reviews, often in languages like Japanese, frequently label it a “kuso-ge” (crappy game) but note that its achievements can be completed in mere minutes, making it a curiosity for achievement hunters.
* Commercial Performance: With no sales data available and only one user having collected it on MobyGames, it is safe to assume its commercial impact was negligible.

Lasting Influence and Industry Impact
Cube Color has no measurable legacy or influence on the gaming industry. It did not inspire clones, nor did it refine or popularize its genre. Its legacy is that of a footnote—one of thousands of similar micro-projects that are released, briefly noted by a handful of players, and then forgotten. It represents the absolute baseline of game development and publication in the modern digital era. It is not a bad game out of malice or incompetence; it is simply an exceedingly small and simple game that was created and released into an ocean of content, where it failed to make even a ripple.

Conclusion

Cube Color is not a good game by conventional critical standards. It is devoid of narrative, mechanically shallow, visually barren, and content-starved. It is the video game equivalent of a single, unseasoned cracker.

However, to dismiss it entirely would be to miss its value as a historical artifact. It is a pristine example of the lower bound of the indie game spectrum. It demonstrates what is possible with minimal effort, budget, and ambition using modern tools. It is a game that exists not to tell a story, explore a theme, or provide hours of deep engagement, but to offer a single, simple concept for a price lower than a cup of coffee.

Its place in video game history is not on a pedestal but in the archives—a reminder that for every groundbreaking indie success story, there are thousands of quiet, simple, and forgotten experiments like Cube Color. It is the definition of a curiosity: an utterly insignificant digital object that, through its very existence and complete lack of prominence, becomes a mildly interesting subject for analysis. For the vast majority of players, it is an experience not worth having. For the historian, it is a perfect specimen of pure, unadulterated obscurity.