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Ian Collinson wrote a fair number of games for the Electron, and they steadily increased in style and substance. Perplexity was his last, and represents a new first for the Electron - a 3D maze game in a revolutionary (for the time) format. Imagine taking a game like Pacman, zooming into a certain area and turning the viewpoint through 45 degrees and then keeping your Pac character central-screen and scrolling everything around him as he moves.

Grandslam did the exact same trick with its game Pacmania, and a few Electron owners even wrote to the magazines at the time lamenting the lack of an Electron conversion of Pacmania. They were told in reply that Pacmania was probably too complicated a game to produce on the Electron but, looking at Perplexity, I find that difficult to believe.

Perplexity itself is a large puzzle game. It has sixteen maps and, to complete one of them, you must collect all the diamonds from the maze without running into one of the patrolling monsters. Some diamonds are scattered around and easily collected by just running into them. But the others are inside boulders, and will only be revealed if you knock two boulders together. It's not enough to just push two boulders into alignment either; you need to be able to actually position your Pac-man to be able to push at least one of the boulders into the other. Only then do they give up the goods.

In some respects, Perplexity is a variant to the typical "push the bales" game. It's not solved by running around and hoping to stumble upon a solution. It's solved by taking a long, methodical look at where everything in the maze is in relation to everything else, and then making the only moves possible to bring all the necessary pairs together. You don't just push boulders around either. There are also keys which must be pushed into locks (whereupon they disappear). The keys "face" either left or right and must be pushed only into doors that face in the opposite direction.

In common with some other Ian Collinson games, the top of the screen is filled with a splat of code but, that aside, the game's graphics are very colourful and attractive. The game reacts well and it's murderously difficult. Even the first map is tough enough that it'll probably take you a few tries to conquer it. Alas, some of this difficulty is more to do with the nature of the layout than with the curve of the map itself. The problem is that one false move can instantly render the map uncompletable - for instance, pushing a boulder into a corner that you cannot then get any other boulder over to.

There are also various bonuses inside certain boulders (marked with a question mark). Some are bad, and some are good. The 'cross-hair' bonus, for example, will swap the left directional control for the right one. This is the last thing you need in a game this hard, so avoid collecting that at all costs!

Because the game is played on a 45 degree incline, you're always positioned at 45 degrees from the object you're "facing" rather than the more usual above, below or to its side (as in most other games). Your brain (by which I mean my own brain, of course) tends to have a bit of trouble with this sometimes and intuitively thinks you'll move into the space above Pac. If you make a mistake in this way, it's highly frustrating because you knew what you meant to do, you just pressed the wrong directional control. But Perplexity is totally unforgiving; the only thing you can now do is quit and start the whole map all over again. If there was an "undo last move" key, that would be much better.

The game is a single loader and has only spot effects for sound, but then, as a puzzle game, I think a constantly repeating background tune would just distract anyway. It's for hardcore puzzlers only and it's certainly a unique title in the Electron's library.

Do I personally rate it? Well, that's a difficult question. I want to like it, because it's different, difficult, graphically endearing and solved almost exclusively by logic. But perhaps it's that "almost exclusively" that gets me. The monsters that roam Perplexity's mazes aren't logical. They have a nasty habit of just appearing on-screen and killing you off. On some occasions you're just checking out what's in the area and you run slap-bang into one of them! When you've cleared 80% of the puzzles, taking the utmost care not to leave a single boulder inaccessible or uncracked, being unceremoniously splatted by a monster that runs into you through nothing more than bad luck is vexing to say the least.

You sense the same feeling running through the reviews after its release. Acorn User even went so far as to warn its readers they "might end up smashing their computer in frustration".

As one of the very last commercial games, Perplexity is becoming harder to find now and you may end up paying around £15 for the original cassette. If you have no luck tracking that one down, it also made an appearance on the Play It Again Sam 16 compilaton, which was Superior's last for the Electron.