REVIEW – Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent
As a team, all of us here at Cultural Zest (well, not actually HERE because we’re all over the world; but I digress) have played and reviewed the new Telltale Game, Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent. Here are our thoughts, starting with the ringleader, Jan Jacob Mekes!
Don’t you just love a good puzzle?
Well, I sure do, and so I was very happy to find that Telltale, one of my favourite video game companies, was making a puzzle game, and that it’s inspired by two of the best things in the world, Graham Annable’s art and Professor Layton, makes it all the more interesting. It sounds like you can’t go wrong with a game like that, right? Well, let’s see.
The very first thing I noticed was not in the game itself, but before I launched it. The executable file had the promising name ‘Grickle101’. Puzzle Agent is a part of Telltale’s new ‘pilot program’, where they test the waters with one episode to see if it could be developed into a full series. The numbering system is already in place though, so all Telltale needs to do in future episode names is change them into ‘Grickle102’, ‘Grickle103’, and so forth.
The next thing I noticed was the main menu: very clear design, very clean interface. Throughout the game, this is kept up, and this fits well into the famous Apple design. After all, that’s the context the game will find itself in, having been primarily designed with the iPad and iPhone platforms in mind. That is to say, it works perfectly on the PC as well, which is the platform I played it on.
But of course you’re not going to play this game to look at the menus, but at the graphics of the game themselves. Well, let me tell you, Telltale succeeded very well in translating the distinct Grickle art style to an interactive world. All the elements of a Grickle cartoon are there, from the charming visuals to the bizarre situations, and in full colour too (although the colour palette is appropriately subdued). That Telltale’s engine is capable of rendering these graphics so well is promising for the future.
Now, let’s move on to the core of this game: the gameplay and puzzles. Something that I immediately noticed is that the game holds your hand a lot, especially at the beginning. Assuming that the target audience mainly consists of people who aren’t gamers, this might actually be a good thing, but for the seasoned adventurer, it takes some getting used to.
As for the gameplay itself, well, it’s just like the Professor Layton games, really. You walk around in an intriguing world, a mysterious village with strange characters, clicking on things to solve puzzles. But what Puzzle Agent does, is that it fits the puzzles in the context of the story, something that was sorely missing in at least the first Layton game, the only one I’ve played of that series so far. Another cool feature in Puzzle Agent are the interactive dialogues, which work much the same way as those found in traditional adventure games. It was also a nice touch that the hint coins from Layton have been replaced with chewing gum, which makes Nelson Tethers better able to think, although this is still an element that’s lifted straight from the Level-5 series.
The core of this game is of course in the puzzles themselves. A game like this can look fantastic, have an awesome story and top-notch voice acting (which all applies to Puzzle Agent), but if the puzzles are bad, the game will be worthless as well. Fortunately though, the offering of brainteasers is pretty solid. There are logic puzzles, classic puzzles with a twist, and even puzzles that use mechanics from such Flash hits as light-Bot and 3D Logic. My only gripe was that some of the puzzles required more than a bit of guesswork, while some others are easily breezed through by even a casual puzzle fan.
Well, actually, I did have one other gripe: it’s way too short! Part of the reason for this is that some puzzles can be solved without too much thinking. Over 50 puzzles may seem like much, but at the end I was left wanting more. Of course, any game that leaves you wanting more must have done something right, and in my mind, Puzzle Agent gets a lot right. I really hope Telltale will decide to turn this into a full series. When they improve on each episode as they go, I can see this becoming a hit with lovers of puzzles. And let’s face it, we all love a good puzzle.
JM: 8.5/10
Continue to the next page to see how Jack felt about Puzzle Agent!
[...] = 'wpp-261'; var addthis_config = {"data_track_clickback":true};Since the pilot episode of Puzzle Agent, we’ve had to wait quite a while for the sequel. The first part was promising enough though, so [...]