Puzzle Agent Review

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