If you’re of a religious bent and an adventure game fan, you
might consider lighting a daily candle in your home shrine and muttering
a quick blessing on the heads of the folks at Telltale games. As I
described in my recent E3
Report, Telltale is clearly committed to the adventure genre,
and they have quite a variety of adventures in their stable and in
development.

Puzzle
Agent is a casual adventure that might conceivably put you
in mind of a
rather popular series on the Nintendo DS. Puzzle Agent
is much more casual, however. If you’re looking for a few hours
of breezy puzzle solving and wacky storytelling at a bargain price,
you’ve come to the right place.

Puzzle Agent 2 is, indeed it’s true, the sequel to Puzzle Agent,
which was reviewed here by my colleague Greg Collins. I respectfully
disagree with his judgment that it wasn’t
really an adventure game. I think it is without a doubt an adventure
game, and with this sequel added, it’s a more complete one. Casual,
yes. Short, yes. Miniature, even? Yep. But it’s an adventure
game, all right.

Like Syberia
and Syberia 2,
the two Puzzle Agents really comprise one complete game.
It tells the story of Special Agent Nelson Tethers from the Puzzle
Division of the FBI. He’s in frozen, desperately rural Scoggins, Minnesota,
to investigate mysterious goings-on at the local eraser factory. A
work stoppage at this particular eraser factory is no small problem,
as it’s this very shop that provides all of the erasers used at the
White House!

Based on the Grickle
cartoons of Graham Annable, Puzzle Agent 1 and 2 have
a distinctive, minimalist, cartoony style.

The
game uses a very simplified point-and-click interface. Navigation
is extremely simple, because even though the game is presented in
a third-person format, you do not move Tethers around the screen in
the traditional third-person manner. Instead, a method similar to
2005’s Riviera
on the Game Boy Advance is used: Click on an area of the screen, and
icons will appear if you can talk to a person, move to that spot,
examine something more closely, or solve a puzzle. This simplicity
makes playing the game a pleasure, because there’s nothing to get
in your way of exploring, talking to other characters, and solving
puzzles. There is no inventory, and you don’t even have to bother
saving; the game does that for you.

I give the puzzles high marks, because they employ new twists on
tried-and-true formulas, which add a bit of freshness. There are logic
puzzles, sliding block puzzles, movement programming puzzles, ferry-different-animals-across-the-lake
puzzles, jigsaws, math, and more. But the designers do an admirable
job of giving these familiar puzzle types an organic vibe that really
makes them fit into the game well.

To a non-gamer, the conceit that an entire town was so utterly besot
with and saturated by puzzles would seem simply ridiculous, but as
an adventure lover and puzzle fiend I had no problem just going with
it.

There’s
a lot of dialog in the game, and while it’s not inspired, it’s decently
written and even more importantly, well performed by good voice
actors.

The story is surprisingly intriguing. There was a mysterious event
at the local eraser factory that no one can quite explain or document.
Currently the factory is locked shut and no one can get in. The people
in the town seem secretive, even furtive. What’s worse, Agent Tethers
begins seeing things he cannot explain: tiny garden gnomes
sneaking about at night, and visions of dead astronauts.

The first game ended without Tethers finding satisfactory answers
to the many intriguing questions in the town. The government seemed
satisfied, however, because Tethers did manage to get the eraser factory
up and running again.

As the second game begins, Tethers is still very much bothered by
the unanswered questions from the first game. What’s the deal
with the little gnomes? Where is the missing factory foreman, and
what is his true identity? Is there a murderous conspiracy among the
locals? What do astronauts have to do with the big picture? And why
is there gum stuck all over everything?

Yes,
gum. You see, gum helps Special Agent Tethers relax and concentrate.
So if you are having some trouble shepherding our intrepid agent through
a sticky puzzle, you can “spend” wads of used chewing
gum (yeah, I know) as currency for clues. Each puzzle has up to three
clues. You could argue that this makes the game too easy (because
there is so much gum around you’re never really in danger of
running out of disgusting blobs of aqua-colored ABC gum). However,
this is a casual game, so, you know, whatever. If you want the game
to be more challenging, ignore the gum and the clues.

One more thing: The game has an absolutely lovely piano score. Like
the rest of the game, it’s minimalist, but it’s also haunting,
eerie and intriguing. It made firing up the game even more of a pleasure.

If you’re worried because you didn’t play the first game
and therefore won’t know what’s going on, be of good cheer:
The first game downloads with the sequel as a bonus. They’re
both just a couple of hours long each, so you might as well treat
them as one medium-long game.

System Requirements:

PC:

• Operating system: Windows XP / Vista
• Processor: 2.0 GHz + (3 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent rec.)
• Memory: 512MB (1GB rec.)
• Sound: DirectX 8.1 sound device
• Video: 64MB DirectX 8.1-compliant video card (128MB rec.)
• DirectX: Version 9.0c or better

Mac

• Operating system: Mac OS X 10.5 or newer
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo processor
• Not recommended for: Macs with integrated graphics

This
review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and
may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent
of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link
back to Just Adventure.