YMMV / Cube Escape

• Accidental Aesop: From Rusty Lake: Roots: Don't feed your babies alcohol, or else they'll turn into depraved sociopaths!
• Fridge Brilliance: A screaming parrot seems weird at first ... until you realize, most parrots have a habit of mimicking sounds they hear. Any sounds, not only speech. Now consider that Harvey basically witnessed Laura being murdered...
• Funny Moments: Despite being mostly gloomy and spooky, the series has its share of Black Comedy:
  • Laura's expression and spreading her arms open while having her throat slit by the Corrupted Soul in Seasons looks just silly. With her whole body shaking it looks more like she's having a seizure.
  • In The Theatre the play The Fish and the Parrot consist of a silly display of the animals in question being hooked up to a grid of pipes. Especially the poor fish having the pipe literallt stuffed in its mouth comes off as completely ridiculous.
  • In Rusty Lake Hotel you're supposed to get meat for dinner by slaughtering the guests. Mr. Deer's demise is quite comedic gargling from the poisoned drink you serve him. While Mrs. Pheasant gets electrocuted in her bath tub accompanied by X-Ray Sparks.
  • In Seasons, Laura has a note on her kitchen wall that says "I'm afraid I will do something horrible". It's held up by a yellow smiley face magnet.
  • In The White Door, on Night 5, Bob goes to a disco. Dale walks up to him and says "Hey man, enjoying the night?" It comes across as him either trying to do undercover detective work and being very unsubtle about it, or him awkwardly hitting on Bob.
    • This level also includes Mr. Owl in human form as the DJ, but instead of his usual suit he's wearing a pair of purple shades and a half-unbuttoned pink shirt.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The series has gained enough Chinese fans that its creators made a fan page on Weibo just for them.
• Moral Event Horizon: Albert in Roots crosses it either when he drops his nephew down a well and consistently tortures him for years or when he murders his brother and sister-in-law with voodoo dolls.
• Narm: Ida in Roots always has a very blank and unimpressed look on her face, even when she's dying.
  • In Seasons the scene where the corrupted soul murders Laura is supposed to look creepy but due to the limited animation the woman's reaction looks incredibly silly.
• Squick:
  • Expect to have to rummage through cat feces a few times to obtain needed items.
    • And through human feces in Paradise to retrieve one of the cubes.
  • Mr. Boar in Hotel eats sandwiches made of his own poop, which you have to make for him by collecting it out of the toilet.
  • Roots has the biggest Squick factor of the games so far: you have to feed the family dog a placenta, give a man urine from the same dog to drink, and use another man's semen to solve various puzzles. And did we mention that you have to collect ten body parts throughout the game, using methods ranging from cutting out a dead man's tongue to gouging out a voodoo-controlled couple's eyes to entering a corpse's body through its nipple to find its heart?
  • In Cave, you need to grind up a severed human arm and feed it to a dog. The resulting turd, mixed with water dripping down from stalactites, is then drunk.
  • As well as the feces mentioned above, Paradise features multiple puzzles involving leeches, boils, and people and animals being messily destroyed by insects.
• Tearjerker: In Roots, the last we see of Emma Vanderboom is posthumous as a constellation, and it's revealed that she had hidden the message "Love" in her letter to her son.
• That One Puzzle:
  • Case 23 has a sliding puzzle in its third chapter, as well as a fourth chapter that gives you an extremely strict time limit to complete it.
  • The Mill has what appears to be a key in a box due to the art, but clicking it just closes the box. It's actually a mold; you need to cast the key out of liquid gold. The same puzzle reappears in The Cave, but with a nondescript metal.
  • It's very difficult to get 100% Completion in Hotel without a walkthrough, as several of the ingredients required to make perfect meals have next to no clues on how to obtain them and can be easily Permanently Missable without warning.
  • Theatre features several sliding object puzzles that increase in difficulty.
  • The domino puzzle in Harvey's Box.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The entirety of the Paradox short film is a masterwork in translating from animation to live action, rivaling anything Hollywood has achieved; the room is recreated flawlessly, and the actors playing Laura, Dale, and especially Mr. Crow are all stunningly accurate to their portrayals in the games. Special mention goes to the final scene, which features a beautiful recreation of Rusty Lake, complete with the iconic hotel, and a terrifyingly realistic appearance of the Corrupted Soul.
• The Woobie:
  • Dale Vandemeer. If Birthday is to be believed, he watched his father, mother, and grandfather gunned down on his 9th birthday.
  • Emma from Roots presumes that her son's extended disappearance means that he's dead and spends the rest of her life in mourning, as shown by her outfit always being a black dress. She then hangs herself after being unable to take the grief any longer.
  • Frank from Roots, who was trapped in a well as a child and tormented by Albert for years. Then when he finally managed to escape the well as an adult, he learned that his mother hanged herself out of grief over his disappearance, likely presuming him to be dead. Then, in the finale he presumably dies as means to resurrect his great-great-uncle.
  • Jakob from Paradise has to cope with his mother's death, live with relatives who are unhelpful at best and actively malicious at worst, and somehow fix all ten Biblical plagues by himself. And after all the work he does to eliminate all the plagues, his family burns him alive. At least he gets to survive as Mr. Owl and presumably get revenge on his family in Hotel.
  • Robert Hill from The White Door. In short order, his girlfriend Laura broke up with him, he lost his job at Johnsson's Bird Food, and then he saw on the news that Laura was murdered. He ends up attempting to shoot himself over all this, only for this to result in...something other than death happening to him, resulting in him losing his memories. In a desperate attempt to regain his sanity, he checks into the White Door mental health clinic... only for said clinic to actually be a front Mr. Owl is using to harvest memories, particularly those related to Laura. Poor guy can't catch a break.

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