The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I love Telltale. This is not hidden knowledge. Way back in the day, when they announced Nelson Tethers, Puzzle Agent, I was super excited. I love me some Layton, and nobody had really tried to do Layton. It seemed like a great idea. A long time later, after buying a copy on the iPhone and the PC, I finally played through it on my iPad. I love giving Telltale money, but I have to say that I’m glad I only paid like 2 or 3 bucks total on this game.

Tethers is a likable character, to be sure. He’s just as much of a loser as an FBI agent who focuses in puzzle solving should be. The world of Scoggins, while small, is also weird and interesting. There’s some intrigue, and some silliness. The plot is, certainly, something like what I expected, and has the charm I expect from a Telltale game. Sure, it ends randomly on a cliffhanger, but it did it in a way I bought. Tethers is a guy who solves puzzles. He doesn’t get to be the hero. I am fine with that.

The puzzles, however, are another story.

Telltale has never had the strongest puzzles, but in most of their adventure games, I am okay with that. They have the funny dialog and situations to carry the action forward, and there’s only so much puzzling you can do without breaking believability, even in a wacky cartoon kind of scenario like a Sam and Max episode. However, Layton solved this problem by having the puzzles almost completely separate from the story, and therefore able go be whatever brain teasers they could come up with. Puzzle Agent could have done this as well, but completely fails at it. The vast majority of the puzzles are actual jigsaw puzzles or grids of tiles you have to spin into a particular organization. These are extremely trial and error. The jigsaw puzzles will stick permanently together when you make a correct match, rewarding you for sliding pieces about at random until they click together by luck. The rotating piece puzzles use art that only matches up if it’s rotated correctly. Incorrect paths never seem remotely right. You just rotate until the art looks okay.
On top of all this, what good puzzles they have they reuse with small tweaks. This works in Layton, where you have close to 200 puzzles in the game, and thus a series of three puzzles of increasing difficulty doesn’t bother one much, but Puzzle Agent only has maybe, what 25? 30? It’s not enough to handle that repetition.

I was a bit disappointed, yes. Hopefully the announced sequel will be better. It’s still a fantastic idea and Telltale is still a great company. It just wasn’t yet ready for prime time.