With the latest trends in gaming being explosive battles and things that give you the heebie jeebies or micromanaging everything from ancient civilizations to movie studios, it’s not all that often that a game based solely on puzzle solving pops up in the mix. Being a far cry from many games on the market these days, PQ is a game that tests your Practical Intelligence Quotient, rather than the well known IQ. The game throws puzzles at you that range from moving blocks and walls, to avoiding being seen by other characters as well as needing to calculate weights and maneuver treadmills and escalators to solve others. The game is really one big test that is broken down into 10 levels, each consisting of 10 puzzles that will all judge your logic, judgement, efficiency, perceptiveness, and speed. Some of the tests you’ll come across are overly simple, while others are just mind bogglingly difficult. You will need a good memory for some, good prediction for others and a working brain in your melon for all of them.

The layout of each level is very similar in a Metal Gear Solid VR training mission style. The black walls and floors are lined with white grids to easily show where you can move objects and since each move it counted, it helps plan your moves in advance to keep them to a minimum. Your controlled character in the game is a pure white figure that contrasts starkly to the surroundings. Some levels you can see in their entirety without moving around too much, where as some require going through doors and covered hallways. Planning the moves you are going to make is easy enough when you can see the entire puzzle, but for some of the later ones that are rather large, you won’t be able to see your objective until you get farther along. The camera is controlled by the left and right shoulder buttons, but can only spin left and right and sometimes objects will block your view of what needs to be done.

Before you jump feet first into the game, there are 5 tutorials that show each of the different types of puzzles you will encounter. They can be a bit lengthy, but you will definitely want to pay attention to them for when the real game kicks in. The tutorials also explain how the number of moves and time you take weighs in and how you will be penalized if you dilly dally or just get stumped. During each of the puzzles, it’s quite often that you’ll find that you have screwed up and painted yourself in to a corner, so to speak. When you have made a mistake, you can choose to retry the puzzle which will reset all the pieces, but not the number of moves you have left. If you are completely stuck on it, go one better and completely skip it, although you will get charged a penalty on your over all score. Sadly there is one glaring loophole in the game that players will find pretty quick. If you do mess up or realize you have taken too long or used too many moves, you can simply quit the game from the menu and load your game back up with full time and full moves.

Once you finally do reach the end of the test, and assuming that people have uploaded their honest scores, you can connect to the PQ site via the infrastructure mode on the PSP and compare your scores around the world. Scores are listed by country and several other categories so you can see how well you did on separate lists. It really would have been a great feature to use, just to see how well you stack up against the other brains across the globe, but unfortunately, the loophole does leave a wide open gate for anyone to upload their inaccurate scores. PQ is definitely a unique game, one of the most unique seen in long while, although it isn’t a game you will be sitting down to play for hours at a time. It really is a great game to pick up and play through a few puzzles at a time when you have some time to kill and you feel like exercising your brain cells. However, it can get quite tedious and lose its appeal rather quickly after you run through a good number of puzzles in a session. If you need a game that you can pick up at any time and immediately jump in for some quick brain teasing, PQ is definitely one to snag, but if you are looking for a game that is action packed and will have you on the edge of your seat, this may not be your cup of tea.