The Let's Play Archive

Puzzle Agent

by toddy.

What would you like to tag this LP as?

Original Thread: Gum helps me concentrate. Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent [VLP]

If you liked this LP, you might also like Advance Wars 2 by Paul.Power, Resident Evil 4 by The Dark Id and Super Mario 64 by Dr. Meat



Publisher: Telltale Games
Designer: Graham Annable
Genre: Adventure/Puzzle
Platforms: Windows, Mac OS X, PlayStation Network, iPhone, iPad
Released: June 30, 2010

Telltale is a development team very well known for their large number of point-and-click adventure games which bring back series many gamers thought would be long dead in modern gaming. Releasing new takes on old games such as Sam and Max as well as making new series like Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People.
Telltale teamed up with famous cartoonist Graham Annable, also known as Grickle. Annable is known particularly well for his interesting style of drawing and character design, using a very crayon-esque, pencil-like outlining and low framerate animation. He also has a great and very unique way of storytelling in his short films. You can find these short films on his YouTube channel.

Puzzle Agent is a very unique kind of adventure game. It's a game heavily based on a puzzle mechanic, so much so that it integrates the theme of puzzles into the story itself. The art style is very similar to Annable's works, and the storytelling is dark and often really funny even at times where really strange stuff is going on. The puzzles are challenging but not your typical bullshit adventure-game logic stuff you'd expect as all the puzzles in the game are set out in a very linear way.

Long story short, it's a really fun game, the story is really good and the puzzles are actually puzzles.

In the game you play as Nelson Tethers, the only known member of the FBI's puzzle research division, a man known for his skills in puzzle solving and his unusual addiction to chewing gum.
During a quiet and slow day at the office he falls asleep at his desk, and is encountered by a astronaut in his sleep who writes a very strange note on his freshly printed crossword. After a bizarre series of events, Nelson wakes up to find the crossword (which he proceeds to rip up in some sort of post-night-terror fit and subsequently solve) had the same note written on it: "SCOGGINS"
Nelson is then called out to investigate the mystery behind a recent disappearance at the Scoggins Eraser factory which has caused its closure. The factory supplied the White House with its erasers.

Democracy is at stake, let's save those erasers.

About the LP
This will be a solo voice-commentary LP. There won't be much of it because all of the dialog and cutscenes are all voiced. I chose against using subtitles because there's enough text on-screen as it is and regardless how rare they'd be they'd just get in the way of the comic-bubble dialog and other text.
At the end of most episodes I'll have a puzzle left unsolved for the thread to discuss and work out. Ideas like the notpron thread come to mind as it seems you folks really like to hop on the puzzle sleuth bandwagon so that should be a lot of fun.
This game is also recorded in 720p, I hope the extra hour and a bit of encoding satisfies your hunger for pixels.

Now it's time for some thread rules and things to note:

- Once you see this game through once, it sort of takes the magic away in subsequent playthroughs. Watch the first few videos and if you feel that you'd like to buy and try the game I suggest you do. You have been warned.

- Grickle and Telltale stuff discussion is welcome, just try not to jump too far off the rails and talk about your 12-hour Poker Night session. Although I will make girlish screams of joy if Telltale includes Tethers as a table character. Hell, I might even actually get the game.


(polsy) (download) (youtube) :: (puzzle)






(polsy) (download) (youtube)

Just a note that the download is in fact an mp4. When you download the flv file just change the extension to mp4 and you should be golden. Yes, I'm lazy, but I'm not going to argue with an easy way of getting HD on blip.

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