PQ: Practical Intelligence Quotient (PSP)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.0 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Ryan Davis
• Reviewed on: 01/11/2006
• Updated on: 05/17/2006
• Released on: 01/10/2006
• Originally published on GameSpot: PQ: Practical Intelligence Quotient (PSP) Review

Since the days of Tetris, it has been inferred that puzzle games are somehow a more pure intellectual pursuit than most any other type of video game. And with their abstracted settings and quietly cerebral gameplay principles, it's not hard for puzzle games to cop a vaguely academic tone. PQ: Practical Intelligence Quotient, however, takes the intelligentsia pedigree of puzzle games a step further, asserting itself as a legitimate gauge of your own mental capacity. It's not entirely successful to this end, but if you can look past its weird, cocky scientist vibe, PQ still offers some challenging puzzles that put a unique spin on some puzzle game standards.

Maintaining its analytical air, PQ is structured similarly to a pen-and-paper intelligence test. You're given 100 "questions," with each question being a 3D logic puzzle that you must solve. A score, based on the amount of time and the number of turns it takes, is given for each question, and once you've completed all 100 questions, your overall PQ score is calculated. There's an online leaderboard for you to compare your final score with other players, but there still isn't enough context for the PQ score to really mean anything.

The value of the PQ score is further diminished by a weird kink in the way you can retry questions. If you reset a question, all of the pieces will be restored to their original placement, but the time and turns you spent the first time through will still be used to determine your score for that question, theoretically providing a more honest score of your abilities to solve the question. However, if you quit out to the main menu, then retry a question, your time and turn count start afresh, thus making it easy to inflate your score. For a game that places so much importance on these scores, this seems like a pretty glaring loophole.

So, forget all the PQ score stuff. Without greater context and better control over the scoring, it's pretty worthless. But even when stripped of their greater overall purpose, the individual puzzles that you'll be presented are still inventive and can provide challenging tests of your capacity for calculations, memorization, spatial relations, lateral thinking, and predictive reasoning, often all at once. Each puzzle takes place inside a box, with your influence on the puzzle represented by the white silhouette of a person standing inside the box. The means can vary wildly, but your goal is always to get your avatar, from where it stands at the start of the puzzle, to the exit. Your avatar can move around the grid inside the box pretty freely, stepping up or down one level at a time, picking up and putting down smaller polygonal shapes, pushing and pulling larger shapes, and interacting with various types of machinery.

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