I.Q. Academy

The brain was never made to live this long. Whereas for most of its evolutionary history the human body has retired at 50, these days we keep it pedalling furiously away for eight decades or so before allowing it to collapse into the welcoming earth.

The other organs can get away with poor performance, receiving stents, pacemakers, and even complete substitutions as they start to show signs of wear, but the brain just isn't customisable. Once it goes, that's it.

People are therefore clamouring for ways of warding off the dementia in later life. Puzzles used to be a way for nerds to pass the time, but lately they've taken on an almost medicinal sheen in the light of widespread docility.

Of course, because puzzle makers now have the advantage of an audience who believe that failure to keep the brain stimulated and exercised will result in a perpetual confusion – twilight years without a torch – their games are proliferating like bluebells in spring.

I.Q. Academy belongs to this new genre, and its subject is the visual aspect of conventional IQ tests, which the game confidently informs us is related to the right hemisphere of the brain.

Play charts your progress through phases of your education. You begin as a school child, develop into a university student after you complete the sequence of puzzles, and graduate to increasingly advanced intellectual states each time you replay the game, eventually attaining the status of philosopher.

The puzzles are: discerning which colour of tile predominates on a board, telling the time on an analogue clock, counting cubes in a pile, being shown a shape and then finding its rotated twin in a line up of similar shapes, and so on.

Every repetition sees the puzzles become slightly more difficult, with a resulting increase in the IQ score it awards at the end. As a schoolchild you have an IQ of 65 or so, while as a philosopher you boast a number in excess of 140.

Strictly speaking, IQ doesn't work that way. It is determined as the mean score of all people who take the test within a given age range. 100 is by definition average, and a schoolchild's test is very different from an adult's test.

Being not schoolchildren but cognitively vigorous video game writers, we were a little put out to discover that our IQ was in the 60s first time around, although we were able to achieve higher numbers by repeating the test over and over again. Needless to say, the scores do not reflect the players' true IQ, but are a way of describing the game's simple scoring system.

I.Q. Academy is not an authentic IQ test, then, and nor is it mentally taxing. Employing a sequence of basic spatial conundrums, it is unlikely to help you cultivate a gigantic pulsating brain.

Indeed, according to Professor Lord Robert Winston (who the smart ones amongst you will know from TV – those of you living in the UK, that is), repetitive mental activity can be cognitively harmful, and so I.Q. Academy may even have a counter-medicinal effect, reducing your brain to a quivering trifle of misfiring neurons.

Relax, though. It won't make you sillier any more than it'll make you smarter (in both respects not at all) despite its academic airs and graces, not least because you won't play it for long.

That said, this game would make a useful educational tool for enhancing a young child's spatial reasoning, and if you are a parent interested in adding to your offspring's early learning arsenal by all means buy it. But as a puzzler for grown-ups, it doesn't really function.