Let’s open up with a short confession: I wrote this review nearly a month ago. Why hasn’t it been published yet? Because the second I finished the review, a massive patch that altered the game considerably was pushed out from Steam.
So, against my protestations within the below paragraphs, I have had to play the game twice from start to finish with a reviewers eye (that makes three times in total – the first time as just a gamer, the next two as a reviewer).
Sadly, the more attention you apply to Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent the weaker it begins to seem in comparison to other games within the puzzle adventure genre.
Nelson Tethers is possibly the least sexy FBI Agent around. His entire realm of expertise is to solve puzzles – puzzles that threaten the fabric of the United States of America (which, as you can imagine, is not a common occurrence). He is the one and only Puzzle Agent, even though there is an entire section of the FBI dedicated to verifying his answers.
At the beginning of the game, Agent Tethers has finally got himself a field posting, out in Minnesota – a sleepy town called Scoggin, where an eraser (Australian: rubber) factory that supplies the White House has been closed. Agent Tethers must figure out why this has happened, what has happened and who is behind all this – through solving puzzles, talking to the townsfolk and careful, considerate and above all meticulous investigation. Then, you can go cry in a corner.
Because it gets worse.
By the end of Puzzle Agent, I would frankly take on a Fallout: New Vegas super mutant with nothing but a rolled up newspaper, jumping on its shoulders and whacking it on the cheek screaming ‘Bad super mutant, always, always go in the litter tray’ while it tries to fly swat me with a ripped up fire hydrant, than have to deal with the big bads in Puzzle Agent.
Or have to go through the game again (which, as mentioned above, I had to). This isn’t due to the game itself being terrible, it has more to do with the game being a brilliant and enjoyable diamond the first time around that will lose most of the shine the second time around.
Notably, nothing is terrible in this game aside from the gameplay – the story is brilliant, but the whole is struggling to be greater than the sum of the parts when it comes to Puzzle Agent.
Reviews abound comparing Puzzle Agent to the Professor Layton series of games on the Nintendo DS. I can say both are quite similar, however there are some marked and notable differences between the two.
Both series (this is TellTale Games, after all – with the production values and talent involved, you can be certain Puzzle Agent will become a series) have a structured narrative-puzzle-narrative-puzzle style to them, with optional puzzles plentiful and never far away.
Puzzle Agent falls flat in this key area of puzzles. Each puzzle within the game falls into a rough category of spatial awareness, logic puzzle, brain bender, rotating tiles or pathway puzzles.
Some puzzles are ridiculously easy, some are mind numbingly hard. The first problem for Puzzle Agent is the placement of the hard puzzles within the narrative. I’m married to a puzzle-holic math/science high school teacher (who clocks very hard Sudoku’s without blinking) and yet non-optional puzzle number two had us both stumped for a good twenty minutes (Author: interesting to note that this was the first thing to be changed in the update recently – oddly, by rotating the puzzle 90 degrees, the difficulty level was reduced significantly). The final puzzle had us stumped for three minutes, but only due to a vague and ambiguous hint that we spent more time figuring out the meaning of than the puzzle itself.
Puzzle Agent is shocking and amateur in regards to consistency. Some puzzles are poorly thought through, others make no apology for being so simple you don’t know why a big fat ‘I actually need to do this one???!?’ button wasn’t included on screen and others will make you shriek and pull your hair out. Some hints give away ¾ of the puzzle, other hints will cause you to second guess everything due to their lack of clarity. While most have been cleaned up in the update (that was obviously crafted from player feedback) there are still messy points that detract from the overall feeling and nuance of the game. With a game that relies so heavily on atmosphere and the creation of suspense, niggly things remove the enjoyment and tension that everything else requires it. With puzzles being the only form of gameplay, you can see how something powerful on story but lacking in this key area can cripple replay value, especially with a lack of variety in the style of puzzles. A little more imagination and this could have been a top notch game, rather than a weird jig saw that doesn’t quite work in some cases.
What holds Puzzle Agent together is everything else.
The self depreciating/self aware humour that is a permanent companion through the game really strikes a beautiful chord. From the FBI puzzle answer verification screen each time you submit a puzzle solution (including the collaborative tally of taxpayers dollars spent on each attempt flashing on screen) to the self awareness of the protagonist questioning why everybody in the town is obsessed with puzzles, the humour is a welcome part of the game and an aspect that, without, Puzzle Agent would not nearly be as good as it is. Plus, it happily breaks the ongoing tension that slowly creeps into everything.
The artwork, by Graham Annable and based on his Grickle Cartoons, is simply gorgeous. Characters almost seem like cardboard cut outs, with the rough pencil/sketch hand-drawn style exquisitely showing how much love and attention has been given to everybody and everything in this game. Standing still, the characters look crisp and clean – but when moving closer to the screen, the edges pixelate in a way that you know has been deliberately designed. Their movements are clunky, but again, like Machinarium, the effect in Puzzle Agent is one of deliberately chosen artistic direction, rather than laziness.
The voice acting is good. Well, we’re not talking a chatty serialised magnum opus such as the Legacy of Kain series (in which theatre veterans were hired) – the voices do the job, and they do it well. Some characters (I’m thinking specifically of one major character) seem overplayed and hammed up – until one crucial point in the storyline where afterwards the voice sounds so sinister and threatening that you involuntarily shiver whenever you hear the character start speaking from off screen. It is testament to the story that such a change can occur in your perception of a character, without the character changing one ounce. However, that character and perhaps one other stand out – the rest of the voices are simply there.
The script and the art of the story in Puzzle Agent show absolute brilliance. When you can meld puzzles so completely with creepiness, psychological strain with overtones of flat out horror and then couple it with a constantly building tension – you have done damn well at the story.
The narrative arc is such a glorious piece of work that, upon finishing, the player has moments where everything makes complete logical, horrific sense. Looking back, you begin to wonder why you hadn’t seen all the twists and turns the first play through. This is where you must fight the urge to play Puzzle Agent again. Like all good twists, appreciate it the first time but don’t go back to play again. The ending has been ostracised in other reviews. I can say only this: after watching the ending, try to tell me that this isn’t some big set up for an ongoing personal story arc for Agent Tethers. Even if it does involve massive doses of the heebie jeebies.
The writing has been spearheaded by Mark Darin, who cut his chops on earlier TellTale game series like the Monkey Island and Strong Bad series (he is also credited with writing some of the CSI video games, but I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt and ignoring that, as I hope he will in later years). As the Project Lead, Mark Darin has obviously commanded everything with a cohesive vision. From the wry self-aware humour when Agent Tethers has to goad a diner into letting him solve a puzzle for the third time (even though the diner has had his problems fixed on the first solving and is annoyed at having to bugger up his beetle collection yet again) to the magical, mystical point where you realise there is no comparison with other games in this genre as you quietly and completely sh$t your pants out of sheer fright.
What?
Oh yes. Dear God, Yes. Including where the bullets end up.
(As an aside, don’t play Puzzle Agent with your kids, unless you want them to have nightmares. I cannot underline this enough. Puzzle Agent is for, at the youngest, mid teens. Just because the main gameplay is solving puzzles does not mean there is no violence or adult themes to be found in here).
Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent is a puzzling game. Some parts are beautifully crafted, others seem rushed. Like a jigsaw puzzle that is missing a couple of pieces, if you can ignore some issues, you will find a brilliant four or five hour distraction that will let you appreciate how story and art can override bad puzzle and gameplay design. One can only hope that they improve the series as it continues, because the first game is only just landing above average – and when you have other quality entries into the genre, improvements need to be made quickly if a unique entry is to continue being produced in puzzle adventures.
Why nobody has melded horror (or at least adult level creepiness, including a psychologically traumatised Where’s Wally character whose brain you have to rewire) with puzzles before in this style is beyond me. After Puzzle Agent, however, I’m never looking at a stove pipe the same way again.
