A Class In Suspense
I never heard anything about this game. Not a single word, until It was looking back at me from the cold, black background of the Steam store. Intrigued by the artwork, it pulled me into the page where I saw, for the first time, the trailer for it. Fast Forward a minute and a half and I'm playing Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent on my laptop. At first I was unsure what I have gotten myself into, but a couple of hours into the game, and I couldn't stop playing.
Puzzle Agent has you playing the role of Nelson Tethers, FBI agent in the department of puzzle research. His office is buried deep underground but he's happy. He gets to sit in his office and work on puzzles of all types. That is, of course, until the eraser factory is Scoggins, Minnesota is closed by an unknown blast and Nelson is sent to the field. Why would the FBI be interested in an eraser factory ? why obviously because this specific factory makes erasers for the white house and the president of the United States.
The title of this review sums up what is probably the best part of Puzzle Agent: Suspense. The cast of odd characters like the local sheriff and the overly welcoming hotel manager, the feel of a larger conspiracy behind everything, the atmospheric music that felt like mimicking Nelsons own state of mind, and the gnomes. God... the gnomes.
Through every conversation agent Tethers has, you can feel something isn't quite right around here. Offering of "Hot Dish", mentioning characters as "valuable members of the community", and obsession the town has with puzzles all combine into a truly suspenseful experience that kept me wanting more and more from Puzzle Agent.
With that, the art style of the game, that seems super simplistic only adds to that special something that I believe captured me so much into Tethers' world.
The gameplay here is similar to that of Professor Layton, where it has a feel of a point and click adventure game but you're not moving in a scene, but only clicking on things that Nelson can interact with: puzzles, people, taking a closer look at spots, moving from area to area, and collecting used gum. Which is one of the more disgusting things, because gum helps Nelson think, and the town is all out. In actuality, gum is the hint system of the game. each hint costs one gum so collecting them might come in handy in that one puzzle you just can't seem to figure out. Still disgusting though.
The important part of any puzzle game, is to have good puzzles, and this is where I believe Puzzle Agent is at it's weakest. While the puzzles vary from tile rotating and 2D arranging puzzles, to logic questions and ones which are more mathematical, they seem to suffer from inconsistency. The difficulty curve on the puzzles is that of a sinusoid with some very easy puzzles even in the last moments of the game. Another fault in the puzzles is that in a few, the rules might not be all that clear. I found myself using up a lot of hints and reading the rules of the puzzle over and over, trying to understand what is causing me to fail over and over.
My final thought here is simple, if you are looking for a puzzle game, Nelson Tethers has a bunch of puzzle types to offer, even if they travel between too hard and too easy a little quickly. If you are looking for a very cool story that really grips you, for 10 bucks, it is completely worth every penny.
Also, no matchstick puzzles...
