I heard about Puzzle Agent through a YouTube video, which is where I get 75% of my game recommendations now a days. It looked like a fun little diversion and after the epic that was Wasteland 3, I needed something a little lighter. It also helps the game was on sale for about $1. I played this one and Puzzle Agent 2 back-to-back, which is how I’d recommend playing them.
The presentation is the first thing you notice about Puzzle Agent. This was a Telltale game before they settled into that familiar model of interactive movies starting with the Walking Dead. They teamed up with a famous artist to create the world you explore. It’s a very minimalist style that uses simple but expressive characters. To me, it has an early 2000s Internet animation vibe going for it. Characters walk at one frame a second: so more storyboards than animation. Mouths move competently enough to mimic lip syncing for lipless characters. The background is colorful, but they aren’t oversaturated. This game looks like it was drawn with color pencils. The music is a catchy soundtrack that fits what you'd expect a mystery puzzle game to have, lots of xylophones and pianos.
You’ll often hear this game described as Twin Peaks meets Fargo, which is a pretty apt description. You play as Nelson Tethers, a desk agent for the FBI’s Puzzles division, possibly the only agent in the division. You get tasked with some field work as the factory that makes erasers for the White House has suffered a mysterious, puzzle related, accident and you have to go get it back up and running. The factory is located in Scroggins, MN. The Fargo influence becomes apparent early. Scroggins is a slightly off-kilter Minnesotan town. Lots of kooky characters and absurdist humor. As you pick away at Scroggins’ veneer you discover the humorously absurd Lynchian influence. The humor is very dry and dialogue driven. When the weird starts showing up in the form of gnomes, the game becomes unsettling. There’s a few jumpscares where they interrupt a puzzle that got me. Just them silently staring at you is unnerving, helped by the art style.
Another thing you’ll often hear Puzzle Agent compared to is Professor Layton. This is because Puzzle Agent is a puzzle game, I know, who would’ve guessed? The bulk of the gameplay is you go somewhere, question townsfolk, and in the process of that you are presented with puzzles to solve. These aren’t adventure game puzzles where you interact with the world, these are minigames that present you with some type of logic puzzles. You could be piecing a map together, calculating the weight of a laden swallow, or finding a path through the snow using right angles. They kept my brain working most the time and if I ever got stump there’s a hint system. You collect used gum for Nelson to chew on and each piece equals one hint. Now, maybe I didn’t understand the rules, but it felt like a few puzzles were built to accept only one answer when there were several available. I found the bug boxing game to be the biggest culprit of this. When you finish a puzzle you submit it to the FBI Puzzle division and you get to see how much you cost the taxpayers. More wrong answers, more taxpayer money.
In pursuit of reopening the eraser factory, you learn that the factory foreman went missing. The local sheriff is the typical small-town sheriff who doesn’t care much for you ‘city boys’. There’s a weird cult that seems to commune with the gnomes. You get a lot of half answers from people and the game ends suddenly with a cliffhanger. The foreman is, we’ll say, still missing, but you get the factory back open, and that was your mission from Washington. For a game that’s not very long, the ending is abrupt. It may be going for the surrealist unsatisfying ending, but this game feels like it was very much written with a sequel in mind.
All in all, this game has a lot of heart and is a nice little palette cleanser coming off a big sprawling RPG. It does tension well and has some jokes I chuckled at. Nelson is a goofy, likeable protagonist. If you enjoy Layton games, I can recommend giving Puzzle Agent a try. It’s not an expensive game even at regular price. I would suggest buying Puzzle Agent 2 at the same time.
