(no subject)

[kjorteo]

slither and I went through another game, and now I will make another writeup! I don't know if this is going to be a regular thing. I'm not making any promises or commitments. I'll just say that I'll make these things when a game inspires me to make them, and this is the second one in a row to do so.

This time, let's talk about Puzzle Agent, now available on Steam.

Technically, this isn't a co-op game. It's strictly single player. However, we figured out a system to sort of make it co-op by hooking Slither's laptop up to his TV, then playing with him driving while both of us assist in trying to think through the puzzle solutions and such, sort of like the two investigation modes in Trauma Team.

Puzzle Agent is... unique, which is an interesting word to describe a game that, on the surface, is a blatant Professor Layton ripoff. Its atmosphere really helps it come into its own, though. Said atmosphere is also somewhat tricky to describe. It's... unique, it really is.

You are Nelson Tethers, the sole agent in the FBI's somewhat neglected Puzzle Division. When the eraser factory in Scoggins, MN (who proudly makes and supplies the erasers used by the White House) mysteriously stops sending shipments and responds to all inquiries with nothing but bizarre puzzles, Agent Tethers is sent in, only to find that Scoggins is a Town With A Dark Secret. This is the game's excuse plot to have you wandering around, Laytoning it up in what is basically the Coen Brothers' Fargo. Yooper dialects and people named Bjorn: check.

Puzzle Agent's atmosphere is what truly makes it stand out, though. It's surprisingly creepy at parts, but saved from becoming unbearable by a somewhat comedic level of absurdity, like if someone made a gag-a-day newspaper comic out of Silent Hill. The art style (Graham Annable's Grickle) is an absolutely perfect fit--everything just looks cartoonish yet vaguely wrong somehow, allowing the game to have it both ways in a way that one wouldn't expect to work, yet it does. Perhaps the best example of this was near the beginning of the game, when we first entered the inn at which we were staying. Naturally, there was a puzzle where the person who had booked Agent Tethers wrote down his room number in code and you had to help the hapless receptionist figure out which key to give you, and it was... extremely rough, the puzzle on which we were stuck moreso than any other puzzle in the game. Taking a break from that, we found what appeared to be a coked-out schizophrenic Waldo sitting at a nearby table, fidgeting and looking paranoid. If spoken to, he gave a classic madman's rant about the puzzles. Still frustrated from our earlier defeat, Slither quipped that this guy must be the last person who tried to get a room here.


Um....

As you start to uncover the town's dark secret and things get creepy... well, again, it's saved from blatant Silent Hill by the cartoonish presentation and absolutely superb sense of comedic timing on everything, but it does get... well... have I mentioned that this game is unique?

I guess the best way to explain it is to say that this is Professor Layton and the Diabolical Zalgo. If the Layton series takes place in a world where puzzles are the pinnacle of human achievement and something to be delightfully celebrated (waiters in expensive restaurants cheerfully offering delightful after-dinner puzzles after a good meal, etc.) then Puzzle Agent is a world in which puzzles are a gift from Cthulhu, delivered to us by mad prophets who received them from the voices. It's a short game, but very good, and worth experiencing for the... experience.