A Competent Agent Recruit in the Adventure Genre
Taking a break from their traditional faire of Adventure games, Telltale is kicking off their new pilot series with a game that breaks from their norm with new faces, and where the puzzles are straight up…puzzles. If you’re familiar with the likes of Professor Layton and his puzzle solving shenanigans, you’ll get an idea of what Nelson Tethers has to offer, sans the kid partner of course.
You play as Nelson Tethers, head of the FBI’s Puzzle Research division. After an unusual event at work, Agent Tethers is assigned to Scoggins, Minnesota to decipher why a factory that produces erasers (One that happens to supply erasers to the White House no less) has shut down. The story may sound a little odd at this point, but as the plot moves along, more elements start to come together as Agent Tethers comes across more unusual quirks about the aging Mountain Town and its traditions. Unlike other Telltale titles, it features a darker tone and story-line despite the simple art style, which is a polar opposite of most of the titles put out by the developer that usually favors a wacky atmosphere. To solve the case, Agent Tethers runs across brain teaser puzzles that must be solved in order to gather clues from the environment and citizens. The most charming aspect is that most of the puzzles are actually integral to the plot of the game, and in some cases, certain puzzles can’t be solved because certain parts of the puzzle have to be recovered by solving other puzzles.
The game plays similarly to other adventure games. Point the cursor at an object or person of interest and investigate further through various dialogue trees or object interaction, the major change being the puzzles. Instead of pixel hunting for items to use on other objects to further the plot, you advance by solving a number of different puzzles: Tile rotation, picture adjusting, line connecting, path finding, and even riddle solving. Puzzles will range between pathetically easy to deviously hard, and each possible answer must be sent back to FBI headquarters to see if the given answer is correct or not. After completing a puzzle, you’re graded in two categories.
First the game determines how many hints were used to help solve the puzzle. Each puzzle allows for three hints to help you solve the puzzle. (Which lowers your score.) You can collect pieces of ABC gum (Or Already Been Chewed) as per Agent Tether’s pet peeve that helps him think harder on tough puzzles. The gum is placed among the scenery that players can collect while navigating the town of Scoggins. However, gum will automatically reappear once Agent Tethers leaves and re-enters an area. Thereby hints become superfluous to come by; it seems almost unnecessary to force the player to collect them. Then the game determines how many wrong answers were given before finding the correct solution.
The unfortunate drawback as the game progresses is that certain puzzles will repeat themselves with slight variations. Puzzles primarily feature sliding icons over others, some more deceiving than others. You’ll get to a puzzle where you have to adjust items on a plate in order for them not to overlap. But in a way to help players, the objects will snap with each other to combine one image, if they don’t snap together, the answer submitted will be counted wrong, even if it may seem right. Puzzles may also feature some vague hints that won’t be solved so easily.
Puzzle Agent looks like a somewhat crudely animated Sunday Comic strip. Characters are outlined and detailed by penciled outlines and placed in 3D environments that share similar features. The character designs are fairly simplistic, but each one can be very easily recognized from their features. Their emotions appear effectively as they appear worried, angered and even cynical with a few simple lines. The musical score matches the cold, eerily quiet environment of Scoggins which also compliments some of the more shocking and disturbing moments in the story as Agent Tethers comes across potential threat or a life or death situation.
The unfortunate downside to this game is that it may be short lived depending on how you play through the game. Even if you start up a new game, the puzzles will stay exactly the same, puzzles will have slight variations as you progress through. Once a puzzle is discovered and completed, they can be replayed at any time, however you can’t improve your score unless you start a new game save. When the game is beaten, all the puzzles in the game will be unlocked. Then that’s about it, there’s no real benefit for being a top-of-the-line Puzzle Agent.
