Nelson
Tethers is an FBI agent after the heart of J. Edgar Hoover —
staid suit, sensible shoes, plain topcoat, fastidious, attentive and
dedicated. Nelson is the sort of All-American Joe College that Hoover
built his agency around in the previous century. At today’s
Bureau, however, Nelson is the sole occupant of the U.S. Department
of Puzzle Research at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in D.C. He spends
his days honing his puzzle skills by filling in crosswords and chomping
bubblegum, which helps him cogitate. Finally, the big call comes.
The White House has need of his services. It seems the factory where
the President and his staff get their entire supply of erasers has
mysteriously shut down. It’s up to Nelson to get himself up
to Scoggins, Minnesota, and get that rubber assembly line humming
again.

So
begins Puzzle Agent, the latest creation from Telltale
Games. It’s also the first game in what Telltale is calling
its Pilot Program. Which means, I suppose, that Puzzle Agent is on
probation. If it sells there’ll undoubtedly be a Puzzle Agent
II. Sell poorly, and all traces will probably be erased from Telltale’s
offices. As of this writing, the game is being priced like a casual
game ($9.95), which is fair enough since it plays very much like a
casual game. It took me about half a dozen hours to get through the
game’s story and roughly three-dozen standalone logic puzzles.

Telltale’s modus
operandi is to take an existing cartoon franchise, hand it over to
their programmers and turn it into a polished game. The same is true
even of Puzzle Agent, which has taken the cultish, Nordic-themed cartoon
world of Grickle — created by writer and illustrator (and former
Telltale Art Director) Graham Annable in books and animations —
and slapped on some standalone puzzles that they seem to have found
in the back of Highlights Magazine (“Farmer Brown has misplaced
his red wheelbarrow — can you help him find it in his yard?”)
Only a few of the “puzzles” will take anyone over the
age of six longer than a couple of minutes to solve, but the story
connecting them is much more engrossing.

If
you’re already a Grickle fan (via Grickle.com
and the Grickle
channel on YouTube) you know that Annable’s simple pencil
sketch characters often find themselves confronting the mysterious
“Hidden People” of Nordic lore, generally referred to
by the rest of us as gnomes. It’s not certain what the little
bearded fellas in the pointy red hats really want from us humans.
The stories always seem to end when the poor sap is grabbed suddenly
and whisked away — god knows where. Or why. Which is of course
where the fun and the mystery come in. Annable says his work is inspired
by the Coen Brothers’ Fargo (“Ya, you betcha!”)
as well as David Lynch (i.e., Blue Velvet).

Puzzle Agent
isn’t really an adventure game. There are no puzzles other than
the standalone ones Agent Tethers encounters everywhere he goes. The
game is more a third-person, 2D interactive comedy-mystery-thriller.
Some excuse is made about the Hidden People mesmerizing everyone in
Scoggins with puzzles, but not very convincingly.

The
Grickle opus does make for a gorgeous atmospheric game world, like
a great New Yorker magazine cover come to life. With its muted blues
and grays and its simple water-colorish Northern vistas and forests,
the game produces a wonderful “feel.” The music and sound
effects are also superb — laid back but soothingly eerie. As
usual, the Telltale Tool has produced an admirably smooth, attractive
and even witty game engine. The voice acting is also up to Telltale’s
usual high standards, ya, you betcha!

Which is why it’s
such a shame, and frankly a disservice to Annable and the rest of
the production, that most of the puzzles are so lame. The first “puzzle”
in the game is a jigsaw with, I kid you not, nine pieces. Do people
really play these games, solve a puzzle that a quadruped could work
out and then pat themselves on the back? There are a few somewhat
trickier puzzles, but the game also suffers at times from vague directions.
Plus, there’s no room for experimentation. Every mistake gets
rung up cash-register-like. There is, of course, a hint system. You
unstick used bubblegum from the walls and floors as you wander around
snowy Scoggins to give Nelson (and you) extra available hints. Each
puzzle screen also has a reset button and a quit button, both welcome.

The
internet chatter is that Puzzle Agent is a ripoff of an extremely
popular Nintendo DS game series called Professor
Layton. I don’t have a Nintendo or an iPad or a
cell phone or a Wii or any of the other available console platforms,
so I wouldn’t know. The puzzle-adventure has been around a lot
longer than Prof. Layton, though. I know that.

The adventure-puzzle hybrid
is one of my favorites. It has given us such great classics over the
decades as Cliff Johnson’s The Fool’s Errand
and 3 in Three; Andrew Plotkin’s Classic-Mac
classic System’s Twilight, the two Jewels
of the Oracles and Sierra’s Dr. Brain
games. Both The
7th Guest and The
11th Hour as well as all three (soon to be four) Rhem
games are masterful collections of puzzles intertwined with the usual
adventure game exploration. I recently reviewed the freeware Amertis
that has the kind of clever, challenging puzzles Puzzle Agent
should have had.

Telltale
is clearly dedicated to simplistic puzzling in all their offerings.
Who can blame them? Most gamers now prefer extremely easy games. I
don’t know why this is so. Don’t people realize that harder
puzzles are more fun? For the same reason mountain climbers don’t
ascend the nearest hillock and throw their arms up in triumph.

None of this should reflect
on the excellent work of Graham Annable and the other artists who’ve
made Puzzle Agent. Everything in the game is top-notch,
except, of course, for the puzzles. My hope is that Mr. Annable gets
another shot at turning his mysteriously entertaining Grickle world
into a game — one with far better puzzles than Puzzle
Agent.

System Requirements:

PC