Puzzles given a memorable presentation
Telltale Games have put a rather interesting spin on how to present something which is, ultimately, nothing more than a collection of unrelated puzzles. The actual gameplay consists in some railroaded movement across an environment and a series of entirely straightforward brain-teasers of a rather gentle standard. For the bits where the user has some input, this is very standard casual gaming fare. But Telltale seem to have gone out to separate their product from the pack, and they have managed to do that -- this game oozes character. It has rightly attracted it's fair share of attention due to the hand-drawn art style, humour and bleakly evocative setting. The end product is not an unqualified success, but it is certainly memorable and for $10 you'd certainly do well to give it a look.
The presentation is far and away the most striking part of this game. The puzzles are strung together by Tethers making his way through the town of Scroggins, his dialogue with the residents, and his (and the player's) confusion at what exactly he has gotten himself into. The humour in the game mostly comes from these interactions, and I quite enjoyed the understated jokes and poker-faced non-sequiturs. Agent Tethers's bewilderment, the wintry Minnesota town that he is assigned to, and its peculiar residents all benefit immensely from the simple drawings and restricted colour palette. This certainly is a very good-looking game. The voice acting ranges from perfectly serviceable to fantastic (Sherrif Bahg's is especially good), and the Minnesotan accents help the minimalistic drawing style to help give body to the presentation.
There is a very jarring change in tone between the stylish and thoughtful presentation and the really run-of-the-mill puzzles. The game plays off of this incongruity for laughs. The premise is a good example (the FBI Bureau of Puzzle Research... a small town being paralysed by brain-teasers... really?) and the opening scenes plays off of this nicely (like the surprise Agent Tethers shows at getting a field assignment). There are frequently spots where the game revels in the silliness of all the fanfare given to logic problems, like a couple of occasions where plot events butt their head into the puzzle-solving bits.
But not everything the game tries is successful. Except for the two afore-mentioned occasions and the use of some sprites that are topical to the plot, the puzzle sections are entirely removed from the story bits. This really drags the experience down for me: not a great deal, but certainly to some degree. You can't help but feel that the marriage between the two elements is a little forced, and some of the bits where puzzles turn into Puzzle Agent feels tacked-on. For instance, the evaluation of your answers gets treated as reports back to the FBI, and the game tracks how much tax payer money has been spent on Tethers's assignment, but this seems to be of exactly zero consequence. I for one get the impression that, no matter what they do, Telltale haven't managed to make the parts where Tethers is pursuing his mission and the ones where he is solving particular puzzles hang together in any meaningful way. This, together with the fact that sometimes the instructions for the puzzles aren't clear enough, spoils the experience a little bit.
The game ends abruptly and without much explanation (taking less than four hours to do everything), which I don't mind: I don't think there was any other way to do it. Unfortunately, it's not perfect: while Telltale have done a wonderful job of adding character to the series of puzzles, you are too often reminded that the gameplay ultimately is just that: a series of puzzles, and not a remarkable one at that. But the experience the game comes wrapped in is rather special, and I definitely recommend picking up this game and giving it the few hours it asks. It quite likely might to make an impression on you.
