Puzzle games are always a fun time to be had. I grew up loving games such as Portal 2, Death Squared, and of course, Tetris. But it’s been a while since I’ve really sunk my time into a new one. Titles like Blue Prince have been on my radar, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to try them out.
When I was given the chance to try out Q Collection, developed by liica, I was skeptical, as I don’t have much experience with smaller “micro puzzle games.” Still, I was very interested to see how the collection would play and balance the three games within it. Thankfully, I am quite happy to say I had a fun time with Q Collection, thanks to how jam-packed the overall package is. That said, the game still had some minor issues that I wasn’t quite able to overlook.
Q Remastered
Q Remastered starts off simple enough. Initially, the first couple of puzzles asked me to create small objects and touch the side of the wall the puzzle is inside. However, as the game progressed, the puzzles became more complex and tested my knowledge of both shapes and physics. A lot of the later game puzzles forced me to think outside of the box to solve them, which sometimes led to a lot of trial and error. That said, when I finally got through some of the more difficult puzzles, it was a feeling unlike any other. While playable with both the Nintendo Switch’s touchscreen and controller, I found myself struggling to draw at the same speed I did with the touchscreen. On the flipside, the controller is more accurate with shapes.
This title seems to be the one with the most puzzles available, with over 1000 puzzles to struggle with and learn from. While it’s initially fun, after playing through a few stages, however, the experience starts to get very monotonous. I was constantly confronted with harder versions of an already existing puzzle, or the same puzzle with a slight twist. While it makes sense for some of the puzzles to be variations of each other, considering how many there are, it’s also a bit underwhelming. Although it does make up for it slightly with the multitude of user-submitted puzzles.
The other slight issue I have with Q Remastered is with the soundtrack. Each of the 70 stages has a unique song, which sounds like a great idea in theory. Yet, as I struggled and had to retry puzzles over and over again, I soon realized that almost every single track is pretty short and loops quickly. While understandable, as this collection is based around quick bite-sized puzzles, I would’ve liked it if they either went on for a bit longer or had an extra track for each stage. Overall, I really liked my time with Q Remastered; the sheer amount of puzzles had me overwhelmed in the best way possible, while at the same time, the amount of repeating challenges and my slight frustration with the soundtrack slightly brought down what was a pretty fun time.
Q2 Humanity
Q2 Humanity opts for a more 3D art style and changes up the gameplay by introducing humans. Additionally, you can now play with up to four players. While it still has puzzles similar to the other two titles, the introduction of characters with unique abilities known as humans allowed the developers to make longer puzzles. These occasionally forced me to move to a new area or to rely on the human’s ability to solve ones that had no drawing allowed. Puzzles are also once again segmented off into their own groups and can be unlocked by simply solving them with the route tied to it. This means that there were fewer cases where I had to solve a certain number of puzzles before moving on, which made progression way easier compared to its predecessor.
Another feature introduced with this game is the ability to play with up to four players. At first, this seemed like a great addition. As time went on, though, I slowly realized that it limited the developers, since they needed to make sure every puzzle could be solved regardless of how many people were playing. This may not seem like a huge issue, since every puzzle I played seemed solvable solo. Even still, it was hard not to wonder if the difficult puzzles that I struggled with were designed to be hard or were designed with four people in mind.
Despite being my overall favorite title in the collection, Q2 lacks some of the quality-of-life features from the original. You can’t quickly restart a puzzle, the slow speed between changing puzzle areas, or even the IQ test, which, while not important to the first game, was a fun little side mode that tested my ability to complete puzzles while drawing as little as possible, is not available in this title. Overall, Q2 Humanity, while an improvement over the other two games in this collection, does have issues that slightly bring down the fun time I had.
Q With Vtubers
Q with VTUBERS has a really unique and interesting premise. While the previous game had some user-made puzzles, this one touts having over 60 puzzles all made by over 20 VTubers from Japan. Even though it has fewer puzzles than the other two games in the collection, the game makes up for it by having the puzzles feel more personal. This is because, every so often, a puzzle references a VTuber or their community. Some of them are pretty straightforward to pick up on, but others easily went over my head, as I’m not a huge VTuber watcher. Despite that, it was still nice to see VTubers that had fun with the original game be able to work with liica to make this title for both them and their fans.
The game also includes 3 songs sung by some of the VTubers who took part in this collection. While they sound fantastic, they also suffer from the same looping problems that I had with some of the songs from Q Remastered. It’s a shame, since I grew to enjoy the songs and would’ve liked to hear one or two more songs from these artists. However, considering how short this title is compared to the other two in this collection, it’s understandable they didn’t go all out.
A Puzzling Collection
Q Collection is one of the most unique puzzle games I have had the opportunity to play. Each title was filled to the brim with some incredibly difficult challenges and had a simple yet charming art style. Further, the fact that you’re able to switch seamlessly between touchscreen and controller is great, despite the issues I had with the control schemes. What slightly brings down my enjoyment of the collection is the short looping music and repetitive puzzles.
I really liked what I played from this collection. I think each game has some fantastic puzzles and stands out from one another, with Q2 being the best title in the collection for all the improvements in both gameplay and presentation it has over the others. On the flipside, Q with VTubers is the weakest, primarily due to how short it is. Yet, even in spite of these issues, this is still a puzzle collection that will have players coming back for more for quite a while.
Disclaimer: Aksys Games provided a Nintendo Switch copy of Q Collection for review purposes.
