Review: Puzzle Agent is a post from: Best Iphone Apps Review Website
- Price: $4.99 (Download here)
- Version: 1.0
- Official Site: Telltale Games
The first time we’re introduced to Nathan Tethers — a character who’s so unremarkable that it’s almost funny — he’s asleep at his desk, slumped over the crossword page of a newsletter. It’s a fitting introduction.
For those of us who’d sooner reach for our mobile phone’s RSS feed aggregator than pick up a newspaper, that’s exactly what Puzzle Agent is. It’s a crossword and comic strip section for the Information Age. As it turn out, a digital version of the crossword page still isn’t that entertaining.
Set in a small, fictional, northwestern town, Puzzle Agent’s script takes cues from the dry humor of the Coen Brother’s Fargo and the bizarre supernaturalism of Twin Peaks. Just don’t expect to run across any midgets in tuxedos living in the walls or people getting stuffed into wood chippers. Telltale’s story is subdued, flat even: it’s a comedy of manners that forgets to be witty, a theater of the absurd that skirts around absurdity.
Agent Tether’s investigation into the circumstances surrounding an accident at a local eraser factory is presented in a sketchbook style and told through a series of comic-strip like vignettes. Funnier than comic fluff like Cathy and Family Circus, yet far less entertaining than the plots of the game’s inspirations, these skits are connected by a quasi-point-&-click adventure framework, and in turn connect a grab-bag of logic puzzles.
The selection of puzzles are mixed, but are largely the types of puzzles you’d find in the back of a Boys’ Life. You’ll help a waitress remember customers’ orders by scrutinizing a non-conclusive list of facts, and place logs on a grid to make a path for Nathan to ride his snowmobile along.
You won’t be asked to determine when two trains will meet if one train is traveling from St. Paul to Bismarck at 45 mph and the other is traveling from Bismarck to St. Paul at 27 mph, pulling out of the gates at 11:00 and 11:15 respectively, but it wouldn’t feel out of place.
There’s nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned puzzle, but these rarely got my gears turning. Few of the puzzles benefit from the things computers can do. A pen and paper are often all you’d need to solve them, and having a scratch sheet on hand can prove helpful. There are a number of rotating tile-based puzzles, including jigsaws, which indeed feel marginally interactive.
Puzzle Agent is a well-planned and produced game, but while each of its pieces fit, none of them are remarkable. The writing, the puzzles, and the graphical adventure trappings are underwhelming, and the results are too.
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