TellTale Games' Puzzle Agent is a combination of two very amazing things: A Professor Layton style adventure filled with mind-boggling puzzles, and a creepy, foreboding setting and story from Grickle creator Graham Annable. If you're not familiar with Graham's work, check out the video that inspired Puzzle Agent here, or below. Trust me, it's worth a look.

A creepy and foreboding puzzle game? Those things don't sound like they're meant to coincide. At least, that's what I thought until I played Puzzle Agent, and I was instantly impressed. Puzzle Agent manages to create a unique and fun experience that is both haunting and hilarious. It sounds a bit contradictory, and at points in the game it feels that way too, but in motion Puzzle Agent plays great.

While there are a few rough edges Telltale will need to smooth over before releasing another episode of Puzzle Agent, I can say confidently that this a game you should play, Ranters.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt5lB-RoAi4

Puzzle Agent begins by introducing us to Nelson Tethers, an obviously introverted FBI officer in the US Department of Puzzle Research. Tethers soon receives a phone call assigning him to reopen a factory that is providing the White House's pink pearl erasers. The location is the remote, snowy city of Scoggins, where nothing is as it seems.

Upon investigation Tethers find there has been an "accident" at the local eraser factory, resulting in the disappearance of the company's foreman. The townsfolk, of course, are unwilling to discuss the topic at length. On top of that mystery, everyone seem afflicted with an unhealthy puzzle obsession, a predisposition for hearing whispers, and nibbled ears.

Without delving further into the details of Puzzle Agent's plot, let me clearly convey that it only gets odder. Never to the point where you'd say it's ridiculous, but I was consistently surprised. Most impressive though, is how Puzzle Agent leaves you in a constant state of unease. Every twist and turn of the story is extremely unsettling, yet intriguing, and there were numerous times throughout the game I forced myself to take a deep breath and relax my shoulders.

It is literally a feature length, interactive Grickle adventure. Designed to jar and disturb you in curious ways, Puzzle Agent players can expect some of Graham Annable's finest work. If you've watched or read any of Graham Annable's stories then you'll know the themes very intimately. Experienced or not, you are ill-prepared.

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The natural progression of gameplay in Puzzle Agent is very intuitive. You'll enter an area, click everything, and either discover a puzzle or talk to the area's inhabitants.

In a genius move, TellTale minimizes the clicking by adding a sonar like zone which spreads after each click. The spreading zone with light up each interactive point on the screen, and then slowly fade away. It obliterates the point-and-click adventure aspect of the game, allowing players to skip straight to the puzzles or story elements of the game.

Discussions with the townsfolk are a bit hit-or-miss. On one side it's nice to see that every person in Scoggins has a personality and a perspective on the events occurring in the town. The other side is that every single person is overly surreptitious. Yes, that appropriately adds to the atmosphere in Puzzle Agent, but as far as gameplay goes it feels aloof and clumsy. If Puzzle Agent gets approved for a full season, I'd like to see the characters with some more meaningful dialogue. It's not to the extent of Professor Layton's characters, which are meaningless and

The heart of Puzzle Agent's gameplay is, naturally, the puzzles and it does deliver. You'll encounter puzzles about gnome smuggling, puzzles about space power outages, but most puzzles extremely contextual, pertaining to the troublesome situation Tethers has managed to find himself in. Each puzzle refreshingly different from that which you'd find anywhere else, and with the completion of each you actually feel like you've helped Tethers perform his duties.

If you're familiar with Professor Layton, you'll feel right at home completing puzzles in Puzzle Agent. This means that upon discovering a puzzle you'll transition to a puzzle mode: a fancy series of animations showing how your puzzle is being saved in a folder and then mailed back to FBI headquarters for approval. Whereupon your efforts will be graded based on the number of attempts it took you to solve the puzzle, and how many hints you required.

Click here to go to Page 2 of Game Rant's Puzzle Agent Review!

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The actual puzzle will provide everything you might require for completion. Your objective, the puzzle's specific rules and options to reset or quit the puzzle are all at your fingertips. You can also spend bubble gum, items hidden around the town of Scoggins, to receive one of three available hints. You'll definitely be using some of them! The interface is extremely simple to use, which is nice because some of the puzzles will eat your soul.

Yes, due to the puzzles being contextual, rather than a random sudoku, mathmatics or matchstick problem, occasionally you won't exactly understand what's going on. For example one gentleman wants you to look at an x-ray to help him find the rubber band in his stomach, hidden among a conglomeration of tape worms. Think about that for a little while and understand that solving a puzzle under those circumstances might be troublesome.

There is one serious problem I have with Puzzle Agent, pertaining to the puzzle system it employs. The variety of bells and whistles that go off every time you enter a puzzle, or submit a puzzle (correctly or incorrectly) is distracting beyond belief. Especially near the end of the game where you're caught in the final wave of excitement, with appropriately mysterious music pounding in your ears, and then you're torn away to listen to pencil sharpeners, a delivery truck, a loud stamp with a buzzer, followed by a graphic explaining how well you performed. It doesn't necessarily ruin the experience, but it's still completely offsetting. A lesser story might have suffered egregiously and Puzzle Agent does feel worse because of it.

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Luckily, everything else about Puzzle Agent is just so good. Graham Annable's design and artwork, while simplistic, are true art in motion. The animation intentionally stutters, creating levels of tension in virtually any situation. Combined with the complementary fluidity of each character's eye movements, Puzzle Agent creates a harrowing experience out of virtually any situation.

On top of it all is a collection of sound effects and music that are made to keep you spooked. It's like a horror film building up to a murder scene, slowly letting the music build up to the penultimate moment. Then add in Tether's screams, yawns, and the excellent voicework performed by the entire case and you can't complain.

There's another important detail worth mentioning, though it has no direct consequence on this review. Telltale Games is launching Puzzle Agent as the initial title in their Pilot Program, a program devoted to trying out new ideas to see how they perform in the market. To put it bluntly, Telltale wants to know just what kind of risks they can take with their games. If Puzzle Agent underperforms then it's entirely likely that Telltale will close this Pilot Program and stick to big, well established franchises like Sam & Max, Jurassic Park, and Back to the Future. Those are all great franchises of course, but if there's the potential for great ideas like Grickle to be made into a game it's something worth supporting.

Puzzle Agent is an amazingly creative journey that you won't find in any other game. The mystery of Scoggins will draw you in and keep you sitting on pins and needles the entire way through. Graham Annable's artistic talents fit perfectly in video game form, and Telltale weaves the story of Nelson Tethers masterfully. While the puzzles themselves are unique and ridiculously fun, the fact that the puzzle system is taken directly from Professor Layton is a bit off-putting. The Grickle motif and the puzzle system feel combative, making transitions between the two feel like sandpaper handshakes. Should that stop you from being interested in Puzzle Agent? Absolutely not. It's a game worth experiencing that will not leave you disappointed. Rather, you're likely to be frightened to do the morning crossword.