Dec 18, 2007

Agetec, Inc. recently announced their upcoming PSP title, Puzzle Guzzle, and gave us a chance to play around with it for a bit. To say that the game is difficult to describe is a conundrum, since we’ve got to attempt it somehow. Even when we got to watch someone else play it, it didn’t really sink in until we got to play it ourselves. Okay, let’s give it a shot…

There are three main modes to the game, so we’ll start with the one most familiar: Drop mode. It follows your standard falling blocks setup, including a split screen with two players battling head-to-head. But what your brain must accomplish is not at all standard fare. Square blocks are two-toned, split into orange and purple sections, which are always divided diagonally. The trick that makes Puzzle Guzzle unique is that you’re working in an environment like a grid (the falling blocks), but must create shapes that link together diagonally… yet these shapes must connect at right angles.

You don’t move falling blocks like Tetris or Puzzle Fighter, but rather rotate blocks that have already landed. You’ll most often be rotating blocks so that their orange halves form big orange rectangular shapes. Take a look at the screen shot above. On the left side you’ll see several glowing shapes - these have just been completed and so are disappearing from the play field. Note how they are squares and L-shapes, but all leaning at an angle. Anywhere that the orange sections have connected properly are highlighted and outlined in white, meaning they can be completed and eliminated. As you can see from the right side of the screen, the opponent has arranged a potentially gigantic orange shape, which of course brings more points.