Edutainment? Now there’s a scary word. Well it sends shivers down our spines. And yet, more and more people are embracing edutainment. It’s big on Nintendo’s DS, massive like, with that whole Brain Age: Train Your Brain In Minutes A Day where you are asked questions, maths problems, memory tests and such other educating pastimes; it regularly tops the charts in Japan. In PQ – Practical Intelligence Quotient it’s a bit different. Very different in fact. Rather than having a question and answer session PQ is all about escaping rooms. You have your little white guy and he’s trapped in a Cubeesque virtual world of rooms. Poor sod. Poor you! You have to guide the wee twat out. Easy! Yes it is. At first anyway when all you’re doing is climbing up some blocks or shoving bigger ones to the side to clear a route to the exit for yer wee man to amble towards. Godammit! Show some sense of urgency man, do you want to get out of here or not!? Plod, plod, plod, no he doesn’t.

Soon enough the complexity of the puzzles rises and you’re having to memorise the route through a covered section or you can just trial and error it, wandering about blind until you hit a dead-end. Other really fun challenges include getting to the exit via revolving doors, finding the correct route through mazes, moving more blocks than you had to before, it even gets you to carry weights on to a sensor, get the correct weight and the door opens! So you can exit the room.

There is another goal, other than the constant exiting: points! Complete each puzzle within the time limit and you get more points! Don’t and you get less, do really badly and points get deducted from your score. If you do even worse than that you’re shoved into the next room, but this is bad because then you haven’t completed the stage and you can’t go back just to try that one room again so you have to do the whole stage again. At least you might get more points on the second run through, if inconsequential points is your thing. The problem is it just doesn’t feel like you’re actually learning anything, you’re just sorting out logic problems and memory tests to no apparent real goal. And it’s not as if there’s any sense of relief or achievement when you exit (and enter) yet another annoying puzzle room.

Tim Empey