"Intelligence Failure"

PQ stands for Practical Intelligence Quotient. The developers would like you to think of it as an intelligence test disguised as a game and while it is both it's ability to accurately test your "PQ" is suspect.

GAMEPLAY
More than anything, the world that PQ takes place in reminds me of the film Tron: there are few colors, lots of electronic music and the whole thing feels like you're inside a computer or perhaps a Cube from that series of films (now that would make a fun game). Some people compare it to the game Rez.

Your avatar in the game is a brilliantly white silhouette of a man who appears to be wearing a suit. You puppet him around through a series of Stages, each consisting of a series of Questions. A Question in one of these Stages is a puzzle. If you've ever dreaded crate pushing puzzles in other games you may as well stop reading right now because PQ is choc-full of 'em. You start out at one end of the small levels and must make your way to the exit. In your way are block pushing puzzles, lasers, take-apart staircases, treadmills, specific weight-activated doors with weights nearby, guards with flashlights, switch-activated doors and mazes where you cannot see yourself. If you've ever played some of the VR missions from Metal Gear Solid you have a good idea of how PQ works.

There is no story and there are no weapons to speak of.

The mechanics of solving a puzzle are wonderful and some of the puzzles seem impossibly hard while others are painfully obvious. The fun for me ended up being discovering what kind of puzzles I'm good at and which I can improve upon. One example of a level would be something like you start off at the bottom of the level, and by pushing blocks, disassembling then reassembling a staircase, pushing a button to open a door, and bringing a specific weight to a weight-activated door to open it, and avoiding a guard you make it to the exit.

The game has set amounts of moves (not steps, but anytime you manipulate an object in the world) and time that it provides you with when you start a level. Run out of any of them and you go into negatives which detracts from your overall score. If you really take a long time you are given a few minutes until you actually run out of time.

FLAWS
There are a few things that really detract from the overall experience of PQ however. The music is minimal electronic techno which can be distracting.

When a puzzle involves roaming guards I question how the game takes into account the amount of time it takes the player to A: memorize or at least get a feel for the guards patterns and B: waiting around for them to cycle around to the right positions so you can begin solving the puzzle.

One type of obstacle which seems unfair are the blind mazes you must memorize before you try and solve them blindly. You have a small mini-map in the top right of the screen but it doesn't actually show you the layout of the map. You get your directions by watching the directions arrow point as they flash on the floor in a tile. They can move pretty fast and can contain numerous directions so you waste a lot of time just standing there staring at them trying to remember the pattern.

Another thing is that when you're near the end of the limitations of a stage in terms of time and moves a large banner appears at the bottom of the screen that reads something like "3:00 Left Until Failure". Failure...that's an encouraging word to see when you're taking an intelligence test. Worse yet, when you "fail" a stage by running out of time the game skips that stage and you cannot go back to try again. I've never been a fan of timed tests and this seems unfair. It would seem to me more accurate to measure the total time it takes to complete a puzzle rather than limiting and applying pressure to the test subject by time limits which leads me to the time limits themselves.

Placing a time limit on someone during a test like this seems like it would cause them to perform more poorly than they otherwise would. I found myself overly worried about the time and movement limit during any given puzzle.

Once you reach the point where you are told you have a few minutes left to fail, the overall color palette of the game turns to an alert status red. Again, it would seem to me that changing the environment of the test to a harsh red would again place more unnecessary pressure on the test subject. Imagine if you're taking your college final and when it comes down to the last 30 mins or so the professor flips all the lighting in the room to red and announces "30 Minutes Until You Fail The Test!" that's what playing PQ sometimes feels like.

One thing I had lots of trouble with is the fact that the person you control moves one block at a time with each push of the D-Pad (the nub doesn't control a thing) but will walk in a stuttered motion if you hold down one direction on the D-Pad, this caused me many many times to walk up stairs or on top of a block on the ground when I just wanted to stop in front of it to stack the block I was carrying atop it. It happened so often that I'm sure my overall score, time wise, suffered because of it.

As far as accurately measuring your intelligence there's a small flaw in the games methodology: when you pause the game you can still see the level you're on and in fact, the camera stays right were you set it. So, for example, if you're stuck on a block pushing maze, you can position the camera on the trouble area and tap Triangle to pause the game. There's a menu in the way but the level itself is still plenty clear enough for you to sit and ponder out the problem.

But all this is meaningless given the fact that the game has one Titanic-sized flaw: it's simple to really cheat. Painfully simple actually. When you're near the end of a stage and you know you will be unable to complete it or just want more time to think about it all you need to do is to turn off your PSP and reboot the game. Bam, instant infinite time to solve any puzzle. Given the emphasis the game places on calculating your PQ number and then allowing you to post it online for the world to see this seems like a clear intelligence failure on the game designer's part. It makes any result you see online worthless because you have no idea if the player cheated their way through.

One way the developers could have solved this problem to a large extent would be to have the game, immediately upon loading a level, write a temporary file to the memory stick with the game's attributes at that time in it. When you complete or fail a level the game would delete that temp file. So, therefore if a person tried to cheat and flipped their PSP off then on again, the game would see that temp file still sitting there and know that the PSP was power cycled and the game would adjust your score accordingly. Simple.

OVERALL
If you can overlook the harsh time limitation and the meaningless PQ score and focus solely on the challenges of the stages PQ can be great fun and a real mind-bender, but if you're in it to see what your PQ score is and want to see it compared to others around the world forget about it. If someone finds a way to cheat they will making the scores you see online worthless.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 01/18/06