I’m in a stand in for Fargo, which is a lot less like Fargo and more like a mix between Bemidji and Northfield. But the developers of this game, with their loose grasp of directions and infantile understanding of what hot dish is and how Minnesotans relate to hot dish (which is basically just casserole, assholes), wouldn’t know about that. I doubt they’ve even been to the Midwest, and their manner of humor smacks of people whose primary understanding of Midwestern culture comes from L.A.’s vision of the Midwest – as a podunk trapped in the fifties, a place of conservative values and button down people. It couldn’t possibly be more removed from my experience of the Midwest, the time I spent in Minnesota digging in record shops, going to shows at First Ave and building giant penises out of snow whenever I had the chance. But that’s not unforgivable. I’m not playing Puzzle Agent for its realistic portrayal of culture. I’m playing it for two reasons – the puzzles and the humor.
The humor works in Puzzle Agent. It doesn’t work exceptionally well, but it’s alright. Occasionally there will be chuckle worthy moments, like when a character’s compulsive love of puzzles forces them to chase after a puzzle book instead of shooting you in the face or when a weird red faced gnome helps you by throwing a button up to you. It doesn’t always hit, sure (the aforementioned hot dish joke isn’t funny – if you get it you think it’s kind of dumb, if you don’t then you’re just going to be confused) but it tries. Some of the puzzles themselves are pretty good as far as jokes go. Smuggling with ducks? Kinda funny. A football team’s passive aggressive relationship with a glass-store manager? Okay. Nothing to write home about, no real payoff, but it’s a four hour game I got for a little less than a dollar. I really didn’t expect much from it in the story department. I just wanted some nice, clever little puzzles.
What I found was just that. Sort of.
Many of the puzzles in Puzzle Agent are literal puzzles. Like, the kind you’ve assembled with your grandmother, or while your grandmother watches and sips brandy, occasionally calling you “a queer” for putting a puzzle together. They’re less intellectual exercises and more a set of drag and drop challenges. Some of the more complicated ones lock in place when you start inching towards a solution, so the “puzzle” is little more than a matter of waiting until your selection moves as one group when you fit it all together. Sometimes the pieces won’t lock, but when this is the case the puzzle will usually have a set of pretty distinct visual cues that you can rely on to show you when you’re right and when you’re wrong. It’s not intellectually stimulating, nor is it particularly fun, challenging, or rewarding. These puzzles smack of filler rather than intelligent problem solving. They’re pretty meh.
The other subset of Puzzle Agent’s puzzles are the abstract ones, where you’re given a picture and asked to manipulate it in some way. Sometimes this works perfectly. For example the bug wrangling puzzles are great: smart, have a clearly established set of rules that they follow to the letter and ask you to find a solution with those rules in mind. A handful of other puzzles fit this criteria as well (including one of my personal favorites – a puzzle that involves finding fish inside of other fish) but they’re stand outs, exceptions rather than the rule. And that’s where the big problem with Puzzle Agent lies.
I’ll give you a great, spoiler-ific example. One of the early, story central puzzles in Puzzle Agent involves decoding your room number. The image you’re presented with involves a series of squiggles on a piece of paper which are clearly supposed to represent something. Hints tell you that it’s a way of writing a number that isn’t the arabic numeric system, that the spaces between the squiggles are significant, and then shows you a red block that looks a little like an N and tells you that “this is the first part of the solution.” None of these hints are wrong, per-sec, but they’re not really helpful. The first one is obvious, the second misleading, and the final one just irritating. I sort of guessed the first part would be at the beginning of the apparently two digit number that I’m looking for. How do I solve for the other digit, though? And what does that even mean? These are the questions that plagued me until I wussed out and checked a walkthrough. Turns out the answer was nine.
See, nine was written on the piece of paper as displayed by the various spaces in the statement. Get it? All those statements about alternate numeric systems were hinting at just writing a number down. And the “code” was actually just a number written out as a word. Ha! Pretty clever, right? Unless you assumed the puzzle was an actual puzzle and not an optical illusion. If only the directions had been at all clear, the puzzle would’ve been just as easy as they wanted it to be.
But they aren’t. And most of the time they won’t be. Most of the time they’ll be infuriatingly vague. Unclear or incomplete directions make simple puzzles way more difficult than they need to be. Violable rules will be completely unstated, making seemingly valid solutions into failures time and time again. It’ll make you want to tear your hair out, and not because the puzzle itself is challenging. The puzzles are just so nebulous at times that the actual challenge isn’t figuring out the puzzle, it’s figuring out what the puzzle is supposed to be.
This would all be well and good, but Telltale does nothing but develop puzzle games. To boot, the testing department in Puzzle Agent had around ten bodies in it. Did not a one of them find the directions vague? Did none of them have girlfriends or boyfriends or life partners they could ask about puzzles to get some outside input in there? Asking someone outside the production team, or just hiring a god damn copy editor, of which there are dozens unemployed in your neighborhood I’m sure, would’ve fixed the issue before it became one. But for whatever reason the puzzles themselves are so unclear that Puzzle Agent is less the smart, funny game it could be and more of an exercise in occasional frustration with little nuggets of goodness tucked in there.
So I’d categorize Puzzle Agent as a failure. It’s not even a noble failure – it’s just kind of a lazy failure. But it’s not a total bust, because it got me wondering, what makes a great puzzle game? If a lack of directions and a structure that punishes experimenting makes Puzzle Agent frustrating what makes relatively directionless classics like Monkey Island Full Throttle are so good? It’s obviously not just the humor, since Puzzle Agent has enough of that for the game that’s there. And it’s not a lack of stakes, because while I like getting a great rank as much as the next guy I never really felt compelled to excel at Puzzle Agent’s ranking system, and the game has fuck all stakes besides that. It’s the way that you move towards a solution, the way a game addresses failure.
See, even though Full Throttle and Monkey Island were tough and often obtuse they’d present cute little jokes for each failure. They’d treat being stuck in the game as a chance to enjoy the world around you. Every time you got stuck you could talk to the colorful characters you ran into every five minutes or play around with the various set pieces. Sure, you’d usually do it quite futilely, but it was hard to care when losing an insult swordfight was just as fun (and in a way, necessary) as winning it. In Puzzle Agent I get an annoying beeping noise and the game tells me that I’m dumb. Then I’m sent back to the puzzle with nary a thing to do in the meantime.
If I talk to the townspeople I get the same crappy dialogue bits, and there’s no feeling that the people themselves actually live in the same world. They might as well be in completely different games from one another. It’s boring and meh and I hate it. But in a way it’s good to discover this way, because by playing a puzzle game that fails I can see just what makes a great puzzle game great. Not the puzzles themselves, not the story or the jokes surrounding the puzzles, but the sense of place the puzzles are fixed in, the world around them. Puzzle games, in that respect, aren’t so different from games in general. It’s all about being somewhere, immersing yourself in an experience, and losing yourself in the game’s world. And when it works, boy does it ever work.
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