Imagine playing a tennis game and suffering a fit, only to regain consciousness and discover that, while violently convulsing, you returned each shot perfectly and won the match. Granted, that would be an event of biblical proportions, but you wouldn’t feel satisfied about winning (you’d probably be livid no one called an ambulance), and you certainly wouldn’t feel like you’ve accomplished anything (apart from not swallowing your own tongue). This rather off-kilter analogy pretty much sums up how we felt playing Piyotama, Sony’s latest game to hit the PSN.

Piyotama may look generic, but beneath its familiar rectangular playing field, and Bust- A-Move-style baubles, lurks a fairly unique puzzle game. Different coloured eggs plonk down the screen and your job is to arrange them into lines of the same colour. But instead of manipulating the eggs as they fall, you must highlight each horizontal column, push a total of three eggs out of the playing field – either to the left and right – and then rearrange them, before slotting them back anywhere on the vertical axes. After you connect a line of four similarly coloured eggs there is a short period of time before they break and disappear, and linking other eggs during this period counts as a combo, which further racks up the points.

Such a system would make for a very taxing puzzle game, if only random and unintentional combos didn’t occur so frequently. In fact, it’s so easy to combo by mistake in Piyotama that doing so intentionally just doesn’t seem worth the effort. So you often rack up points without any real sense of accomplishment. We’re not saying players cannot become genuinely proficient at the game – its online scoreboard proves that – but after five hours of consistent play we still frequently found it more productive to shift eggs about randomly and hope for the best, turning multiplayer battles into rather hollow endeavours.

Nevertheless Piyotama is pretty cheap, even for a PSN game, has endearingly saccharine presentation and a decent application of the Sixaxis’ motion controls (which lets you jostle eggs into more favourable positions with a quick shake of the control pad). Fans of the genre, who are willing to put in enough effort to circumvent its solitary (but significant) flaw, will probably be able to salvage an enjoyable experience. Just don’t expect a concept as tight and well executed as Bust-A-Move’s or Super Puzzle Fighter’s, oh and don’t play against epileptics.

Christopher Reynolds