The appeal of PQ should be pretty apparent from the moment the game starts up. This isn't a game with a story. You're here to solve abstract puzzles in a cyber void, to see how high your PQ, or Practical Intelligence Quotient, is. It even has a name and password entry as if you're making an account for some legitimate testing service. The password you put in, they tell you, is never used. It really never gets used for anything.
After setting up your "account" there's not much to do but seek your PQ. You'll know what it is after solving ten stages, featuring ten questions (this is what they call their levels) in each. The general difficulty curve is a bit wonky, but you can count on the final question of each stage to be more of a gauntlet, featuring several smaller puzzle rooms strung together in a maze-like way that expects some spatial awareness to solve.
The types of puzzles you'll solve in these questions range from block moving and pushing, conveyor belt management and weight distribution to more dangerous things like avoiding patrolling guards and lasers. Every question has a timer, and at first I had a pretty fun time racing against it. Entering a new room, trying to deduce what needed to be done, then executing with the clunky grid-based movement before time runs out. For the first few stages, I wasn't even sure what would happen if the timer ran out. Do I just start the level over? Oh, no. Turns out, it's way worse than that.
When a timer runs out, it's actually the beginning of a second, more perilous timer. The cyber grid lines all glow an ominous red, and the alert 3:00 LEFT TO FAILURE appears. So then, what is Failure? In PQ, failing to complete a puzzle in time means moving on. No completing it. You couldn't solve it in time, and you will be penalized. Of course, that's what they want to have happen, but there's a workaround by quitting the question and reentering it to get your time back. It's what I did every single time, because I can't think of something more unsatisfying in a puzzle game than being kicked out because an arbitrary timer said so.
It got me thinking though...failing and moving on is the intended way to play PQ. How can they be sure any player has actually learnt the way the game works to be ready for harder questions if they can't guarantee anyone will solve anything? That's not their concern. PQ is intended to be sadistic in this nature. There's no better way to see this than how they handled question restarts.
There are three intended ways to restart a question. First is by selecting it in the menu. The other two are from contact with either lasers, or detection from a guard. Lasers are very predictable so getting hit is unlikely, but it will still happen if you're not careful. The fun thing about restarts is that they restart the question! Without giving you question time back! This gets exceptionally frustrating in questions that are filled with instant-restart guards patrolling around. You may have three minutes to solve a question, but you need to keep in mind that those three minutes don't care if you get caught by a guard right at the end and have to start over from the beginning. You may have twenty minutes to solve a question. Hopefully it didn't take you that long to get to where you just got caught.
Guards tend to be predictable like lasers.* If you observe their movements, you'll notice they don't break from a pattern. The tricky part is that when they turn, they tend to turn very quickly. If you aren't ready for it, and don't know whether they turn clockwise or counter-clockwise, you're getting caught because you move slower than their turning vision cone covers ground. It can be tense juggling spending time observing them with making sure you have enough time to clear the question without too many restarts, and this would feel a hell of a lot better if failure wasn't as devastating as it is.
*But of course there's an asterisk to them being predictable. Several questions in the game have movable blocks and guards together in the same room. What do you think happens if you place a wall in a guard's path? They begin moving in an erratic, unforeseeable, totally unique patrol, wandering all over the place because they can't reach their next waypoint. Seriously, just don't ever block them unless you're a speedrunner or something. They become so unpredictable that it is never worth the trouble.
By the end of the game, the sadistic nature of these questions ratchets up. One of the absolute worst questions has you shuffling around weights back and forth to open a pressure-sensitive door while just barely staying out of guard detection range. It feels like some of these questions were meant as traps, where they're technically possible to beat but you're intended to lose so that you get tripped up and frustrated. That one in particular had me pop open the Pandora's box of save states. It was just way too demanding for how stiff the controls and timings are. I'll share a video of speedrunner adeyblue clearing it legitimately: https://youtu.be/9r2SrVum_CE?t=5178
And yeah, maybe that kind of design is ok in a game that's trying to make some sort of statement about your logic skills, but I really disagree with it. It highlights the stark difference between a tough boss battle, and a tough exam. One you're allowed the chances to make mistakes, learn and overcome your weaknesses, and the other you either succeed or fail and move on without learning or growing.
My PQ score, by the way, is 133. There's no way to tell what an average score is, so I have no idea what that means. Either way, my score is artificial because this is a version of me that doesn't exist, that abused the system, that was allowed the chances necessary to solve every question, even if slow at times. I'll close this review out with the game's assessment of my performance:
[Ponder Type 51% / Action Type 49%] "Although you are rarely seen making mistakes, you are known for taking too much time to complete a given task. If you can keep the mistake-free work style while speeding up the work, you are sure to make it to the top."