I've been stuck at the beach for a week, leaving me unable to play Metal Gear Solid 4, so I decided to play an old game for my PSP while I was here. The game I picked up was Puzzle Quest, which gained a lot of popularity from Penny Arcade's Tycho's recommendation of the PC demo when it came out. Otherwise, the game is so awfully marketed that it's incredible anyone ever played it. Even the title immediately makes it sound just awful, guaranteeing that no one would ever enter a game store and buy it unless they already knew about it. Even inside the game, it just looks like you'd be embarassed playing it. Despite all that, it somehow manages to be just fun enough as a game.Puzzle Quest (for the DS, PSP, and also at some point it came out for the XBLA, PC, Wii, and PS2) casts you as a fairly generic hero (you pick your picture, name, and class) in a fantasy world that is facing an odd resurgence of evil. The story is advanced through text bubble conversations between your character and others, with no voice acting, and a single expression that tends to look comically inappropriate the majority of the time. Your character must quest against lots of orcs, undead, rats, and whatever else. However, you don't fight through an RPG engine or with real combat, but instead with special Bejewled-style puzzles. Matching sets of three or more skulls cause direct damage, while other objects give you gold, experience, or mana for spells. These spells allow you to actually take advantage of your enemy beyond the mostly luck-based regular puzzle, which means you can actually come up with some fairly interesting strategies for taking it to those ogres. Like the rest of the game, this may all sound like a really bad idea, but it magically just works.
The interesting combination of spell strategies with Bejewled gameplay actually makes for an interesting take on combat that will stay intersting, at least for several hours. I tended to get sick of it after about five separate combats, which is pretty much exactly the amount of time I want to play the PSP anyway. I would still be interested and ready to play again after a few hours, making for a good general gameplay experience. Though enemies have different abilities that will make combats somewhat unique, you still will tend to repeat the same offensive strategies against them, meaning you'll want to turn to the mini-games for some variety. After earning a bit of gold from combat and quests, you can unlock the ability to play mini-games (all still based on the tile-switching puzzle system) to get new spells and mounts. These are fairly welcome, but the fact that you're still only playing a slightly modified form of the same puzzle system means they aren't totally refreshing. Gold from combats also allows you to get new equipment, giving you new abilities in combat, which is also an interesting option to keep you playing.
It wasn't too long before I actually all the mini-games bought and what I thought was the perfect set of equipment for my character, meaning that the gold I earned from then on didn't interest me very much even though I wasn't even halfway through the story. This was somewhat disappointing, but goes to show that the hours of gameplay to actually beat the story are very satisfying if not too much.
In conclusion, Puzzle Quest is a seemingly horrible idea with an awful marketing campaign that is fun to play. It's right for everyone (well, not FPS enthusiasts) on some level, be it the RPG elements, Bejewled casual gameplay, or strategy. I've decided that my reviews shouldn't have scores or even letter grades given the recent controversy over them, so I'll stick with an Ebert & Roeper style recommendation. Thumbs up, I suppose.
