Gnomeone can hear you scream

[davidn]

In hindsight, I think not playing Puzzle Agent alone was one of the best decisions that I ever made. I knew that I'd heard that it wasn't just a puzzle adventure, but I thought that the creepiness of it was just through the stylistically uncomfortable artwork (and I should say that I wasn't familiar with Graham Annable before I started this game, so I may be missing out on some things about it). With the length of the game being what it is, I don't think that I can talk about it without spoiling some surprises, so if you care about that, stop reading before this cut which won't appear on any site but Livejournal.

You play as Nelson Tethers, an agent from the FBI Department of Puzzle Investigation, which sounds like one of those unnecessary bits of any large company that everybody else makes fun of behind their back. At the start of the game, hard at work at his desk, he is suddenly confronted by The Stig and ends up with the word "SCOGGINS" scrawled across his crossword. Then the phone rings, and as it turns out, that's exactly where he's being sent on an assignment to find out what's happened to the all-important eraser factory.

The game involves you wandering around Scoggins interviewing its population, none of whom seem to have slept in about three weeks, and encountering puzzles at every turn that have to be completed before the investigation can continue. If this sounds a bit like Professor Layton, it's because it is - it plays almost identically, right down to clicking around the environment to find hints (which are presented not as coins but as bits of gum). To its credit, the puzzles that you're presented with here are usually much more relevant to the storyline than in the top-hatted professor's adventures, but it could be due to there being less of them in general.

As stylistic as the hand-drawn artwork is and as much as I liked the idea of the game, though, it doesn't really come close to the level of the series that it's emulating. The difficulty of the puzzles isn't very well balanced at all - it starts you off with some easy ones, then they seem to randomly jump from absolutely trivial to exorbitantly difficult (we certainly moved to a piece of paper to work things out a few times). The easiest variety of them are the jigsaws, which have a very generous mechanic of combining pieces automatically when they're placed in adjacent counties, so they become exercises in trundling a piece around the screen and hoovering up the other bits as you encounter them. In contrast, the puzzles that are especially difficult tend to be so because of being poorly or incompletely explained - a few times, you'll click the "How?" sticker on the answer screen to be told something that really should have been in the instructions. And the other half of the time you use that button, in place of a nice explanation of how to logically arrive at the answer, it'll just tell you "Yes, twelve birds" or something equally unhelpful.

Despite all that, though, I liked the atmosphere that the game created. As you work towards getting into the factory, it becomes significantly darker than its obvious inspiration, and I got a huge shock when I was working away on a fiddly rotating tile puzzle and pair of evil shining eyes popped out, belonging to a gnome who then stole one of the pieces. It completely breaks the sense of security that you have of being inside something separate from the game world, and it was a scare that earned my respect!

So you go through about twenty puzzles, finding more about the town and getting harassed by these gnomes along the way, and once you get inside the factory, you discover the foreman holed up in the office. Before you can speak to him, the gnomes flood in and carry him off, leaving you with many more questions that I was looking forward to solving - why were they after him? What's the cult in the town about? What are those angry little gnomes, anyway? Why's everyone trying to kill you and protect the Hidden People? And who was that spaceman at the start of the game, and how did the word "Scoggins" get on to the crossword?

None of these are going to be answered by the game, though, because at this point it just stops. It does a lot to set up this whole mysterious environment, and then seems to suddenly decide to go out for an extended cigarette break. It packs up and leaves, scooting off on its snowmobile without a glance over its shoulder as you're left to stare at the end credits - I was honestly expecting it to be a fake ending, perhaps with the credits being interrupted by another gnome attack, but that really was it. I love it when a game doesn't make the entire story clear to you and you have to go online and puzzle it out with other people to make sense of it - it's something that the horror genre seems to be particularly good at - but this didn't feel like it was inviting speculation at all, just sort of abruptly going home early.

Obviously I was getting quite into its storyline, if I wanted it to be longer... if it had been, then it might have been able to solve the mountainous difficulty curve of the puzzles over the course of the game as well. I suppose I can say that I liked the idea of what the game was trying to be, but I didn't really like what it was.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that they had the intention of making it episodic if the sales had turned out to support it, although I guess at this point, it is effectively an abrupt ending rather than a to-be-continued, unless they're just taking a very long time to announce how pleased they are with the sales.

[davidn]

I'm unsure how to feel about episodicism... episodization... the splitting of games into episodes. On the one hand, it seems it can be abused to the same point that downloadable content is, splitting what would have been a full game into multiple pieces that you have to continually pay for. On the other hand... they're easier to develop, and there's the small consideration that some of my favourite games of all time were episodic, those that were released during the great shareware wars of the early 90s.

I suppose I might even have been more satisfied with it if it had just left the game at the factory with a "To be continued..." - it would still have felt like a demo, but suddenly going to the office made it seem like they were more certainly saying that... well, that's everything, time to go home.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

If each piece that it's split into is proportionately cheaper, then what's the problem with splitting it? If anything, it lets you bail after one episode if you realise you aren't enjoying it, instead of getting two hours into a ten hour game and having already paid for all ten...

[davidn]

I don't have a problem if the combined price isn't more than what I would have reasonably paid for the entire thing anyway! Think of... Sonic 4, although it's possibly a bad example already because I thought $15 for the amount of content of that episode was overpriced, never mind the total they might get up to if they continue to release them. Actually, if they get up to four episodes, $60 is about the going rate for games now anyway, isn't it? So maybe it's better after all.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

(also best journal title ever.)

[davidn]

I'd love to have come up with it, but it was the title of a short film that some friends in university made that defies description. It was mostly an excuse to dress someone up as Noddy and someone else up as Neo from The Matrix and have them fight it out on top of the cliffs.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

I played the demo of Puzzle Agent a little while ago and it stops at the stovepipe puzzle, right as the gnome steals a puzzle piece.

That gave me quite the shock, just as you said - no-one expects the story to continue in the midst of a puzzle! That was a nice change of pace, but at the cost of a few weeks of my life, I think.

I'm looking forward to seeing more episode, but yeah, they made PA to be part of their "Pilot Project" meaning that it may never take off... hearing that it stops abruptly kinda turns me off the concept without knowing there's more coming up. (I've always been buying Telltale's game in Season Packs, I think with the exception of Sam & Max Season 1.)

[davidn]

I was definitely not expecting that at all. It had been... a funny kind of frightening until then! And it was so unexpected that I didn't ever think to watch out for it again, either...

I would have quite liked it to have been more upfront about it being incomplete, though - yes, it appears to have an ending, but it's as if they just ran out of time and money and had to drag you out of the game too early, and I'm not sure how they would now go back on how they attempted to wrap it up if they were to continue now. I'd have been more disappointed if I had paid money for this (it was part of a gift puzzle game pack) but I would definitely want to see if there was a chance of the rest of the game appearing before I were to recommend it to anyone.

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

Good News for you! (http://www.telltalegames.com/puzzleagent2)

I picked up Puzzle Agent 2 (which is coming out this Thursday) since it came with a free copy of PA1, and I was quite shocked at that abrupt ending as well. But it appears that the story isn't going to just up-and-end, thankfully. :D

(And geez, another few weeks off my life. I appreciate that they didn't overuse the gnomes-stealing-your-pieces-bit or else it would've felt stale eventually.)

[davidn]

Wonderful - even that trailer looks like it's going to dutifully answer the line of questions that I proposed in my post!