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Puzzle Agent
Puzzle Agent
Developer:Telltale Games
Publisher:Telltale Games
Platform:PC
Genre:Puzzle-Adventure
Release Date:July 2010
Article Posted:August 2010
Grade:3/5
System Requirements


The president is out of erasers and agent Tethers of the FBI Puzzle Division must travel to Scoggins Minnesota and make sure the official White House eraser factory is back online. What’s more, this is the agent’s first field assignment in ages, which is more than appropriate, as Puzzle Agent is the first Telltale game that won’t necessarily be episodic since, well, ages, meaning you’ll have to support it if you want to see it developed to its full potential.

After all, Puzzle Agent is a truly unique game for Telltale, that according to, well, everyone, feels and plays a lot like the DS mega-hit Professor Layton. Not that I’d know, mind you, as I’d never think such games would appeal to me, but who can argue with the Internet?

Truth is, this is an adventure-light game filled with 50- odd puzzles of the puzzle-book variety. You’ll get to talk with characters using a rather traditional adventure interface and point-and-click at screens, but what you’ll mainly be doing will be rotating tiles, answering riddles and arranging logs in order to solve the puzzles that will allow you to reach the game’s end. Despite the fact that some of said puzzles do feel inspired, engaging, and fun, Puzzle Agent is guilty of unbalanced difficulty, repetition, and even some incredibly easy yet ridiculously elaborate puzzles that feel like work.

On the plus side, this being a project directed by Graham Annable, Puzzle Agent sports some incredibly evocative and highly stylized graphics, that perfectly capture the atmosphere of the Grickle Internet-cartoons. The weird animation, the topquality artwork, the odd voices, the surreal -simultaneously unsettling and amusing- writing, all make for a game that really nails its atmosphere, its characters, and its plot. A fantastic gaming experience only slightly marred by the gaming bit itself.

   


PC System Requirements:
Windows® XP / Vista / 7
2.0 GHz+ (3 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent rec.)
512MB RAM (1GB rec.)
DirectX 8.1 sound device
64MB DirectX 8.1-compliant video card (128MB rec.)
DirectX: Version 9.0c or better