Puzzle Agent 2 (PC)

The original Puzzle Agent is a strong puzzle game tied to a story that managed to build up a lot of mystique around the town of Scoggins, Minnesota, but it ultimately felt like it was an incomplete story. Puzzle Agent 2 pretty much confirms that the original game stopped too soon by fleshing out the rest of the plot, but while it managed to deliver on that front quite well, surprisingly, Puzzle Agent 2 ended up sacrificing some of its identity to do so.

 

Taking place after the case of the closed down eraser factory from Puzzle Agent 1 is solved, the lead agent of the FBI’s unusual Puzzle Research Division Nelson Tethers is haunted by the unsolved mysteries of the small town of Scoggins. However, with his vacation coming up soon, Nelson decides to devote his personal time to returning to Scoggins so he can finally get to the bottom of the strange things he uncovered during his initial visit. Because we are revisiting the same small town from the first game, a lot of places and people are reused in the sequel, and the same silly but off-putting atmosphere of the game world is present as well. The game does, thankfully, introduce some new characters and places so that it’s not a complete retread, and the mystery this time around seems to be more substantial. Not only must Nelson try to find closure on the previous game’s events, but there are more missing people in Scoggins and even more conspiracies hidden in this tiny Minnesotan town.

Puzzle Agent 2 seems fairly confident that you’ve played the original game, and while it recaps a few things here or there, it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s intended to be experienced without the first game. This only further lends credence to the idea that this would work better as one full story rather than one split into two separate games, but the retreading of locations and separation between the events of 1 and 2 seem to at least justify the game splitting things down the middle. A two-episode title would have been a better structure for the Puzzle Agent series, but it’s too late to change things now. Despite Puzzle Agent 1 suffering from a plot with too many loose threads, Puzzle Agent 2 manages to rectify that issue in a marvelous manner. Rather than completely abandoning the Twin Peaks style of having unanswered mysteries and strange goings-on that can’t be explained, the game addresses what felt like unresolved plot points while ensuring there are still some strange occurrences in Scoggins that can leave the player speculative and ponderous. The story is certainly given more attention this time around, the tale of Nelson Tethers given a proper beginning and end with plenty of little twists to keep it interesting as you go. The mysteries are now about how things work or what things were rather than why things did or didn’t happen. There is one aspect of Puzzle Agent that seems to be downplayed much more in the sequel though: the puzzles.

 

Despite being the gameplay elements that link story beats together and a core focus of the original’s plot, the puzzles in Puzzle Agent 2 seem to be from the bottom of the barrel half the time and lazily inserted into play whenever the game could be bothered to look for an opening. Shockingly, a game called Puzzle Agent could have easily stripped away the puzzles entirely and worked just as well this time around as an animated short or video. The story mostly forgetting about the puzzles isn’t the biggest problem with them though. It seems like the team, despite putting in a pretty good showing the first time around, had run out of ideas when it came time for the sequel. An unusually high amount of puzzles from the first game have equivalents in the second, with slight rearrangements of old formulas being far too common to forgive. Even without the context of the first game though, Puzzle Agent 2 settles into a set of around 5 repeating puzzle types that it does a poor job of mixing up, and while there are some unique or rarer ones, you can expect to see the game reskinning or slightly shifting parts of puzzles to try and pad out their small puzzle count. The original game did repeat puzzles admittedly, but they were better spaced out, not to mention many of them were optional and could be done one after another or at your own pace.

Puzzle Agent 2 rehashes most of its ideas from 1 for its most common puzzles, but even some of its new ideas are subpar. From the first game, you can expect to see two variations on arranging objects to make paths, figuring out the chronological order photos go in, and splitting numbers between two sets of objects, with the fifth repeating puzzle being the least interesting and the one Puzzle Agent 2 cooked up itself. The last common puzzle type is the bland task of recognizing the pattern in a set of numbers and inputting what the next one would be, but here we hit the strangest issue with Puzzle Agent 2. While the original game and most of Puzzle Agent 2 rely on your problem-solving skills and only simple math at times, suddenly Puzzle Agent 2 expects the player to have some unusual outside knowledge. Puzzles expect the player to not only be able to intuit binary on sight but also know the digits of pi to the ninth number after the decimal point. Even if we are only considering strictly important puzzles, Puzzle Agent 2’s main story requires the player to know the order of operations for integral calculus! While you can brute force the solution to that puzzle (which sounds strange but makes sense in context), it does undermine your chances of earning top marks. Getting puzzles wrong does not penalize you beyond a grading system, but it still stings when a player has to exit a game and look up answers because it suddenly demands a different type of knowledge than the rest of the game.

 

Those math puzzles are only 3 out of over 30, but even the normal ones tend towards being surprisingly easy. The repetition certainly doesn’t help them, as sometimes you can solve them in an instant after having done them twice in the original game and three times already in this one. It is astounding how unimaginative the puzzle design team was this time around, and there were hardly any challenges that will really stump you outside the ones that require unusual knowledge. There is a hint system where you can find gum in the environment and spend it for up to three hints during a puzzle, and while Puzzle Agent still struggles with giving every necessary detail to avoid misunderstanding the rules, it’s never so bad that you can’t make an educated guess of what it’s going for. The navigation during gameplay also has a nice pulse feature wherever you click to help you find optional puzzles, pieces of gum, and interactive objects, so the rest of the gameplay is still solid even if the puzzles range wildly in quality and creativity.

THE VERDICT: It is a bit of a surprise how much Puzzle Agent 2 dropped the ball. The original was a solid experience even if it felt a bit hollow due to leaving too much in the air, so Puzzle Agent 2 coming back to finish the story seemed like it had all it needed to succeed. The dialogue is still fun to read and the characters remain interesting to talk to, the greater mystery of Scoggins growing only more compelling as new details come to light. When a puzzle pops up though, it unfortunately doesn’t match the strength of the rest of the experience due to repetitive puzzle designs and the odd duck that requires unusual knowledge.

 

And so, I give Puzzle Agent 2 for the PC…

An OKAY rating. Puzzle Agent 2 seemed like it had an easy in for being great, but despite having a lot of interesting ideas to tie up the plot of the series while still leaving some mysteries to ruminate on, its approach to making new puzzles is incredibly underwhelming. The plot is what prevents Puzzle Agent 2 from being much worse, and in a vacuum, many of its puzzles could be acceptable or interesting, but after training you to do them through constant repetition, they lose their appeal and difficulty far too quickly. While Puzzle Agent 2 provided a satisfying conclusion to its plot, it sacrificed the creative spark of its gameplay side to get there, making the split into two games seem even more odd. Had it been one experience it could have spaced the puzzles out better or trimmed some of the fat, but Puzzle Agent 2 on its own seems the weaker of the two games because of its phoned-in challenges. I compared the original game to an activity book, but Puzzle Agent 2 feels more likely the games section of a weekly newspaper, always delivering on the same standard puzzle types but sometimes suddenly throwing in something that expects you to have oddly specific knowledge.

 

While Puzzle Agent 2 certainly delivers on fleshing out the Agent part of its title with a wonderful conclusion to its surreal and silly tale, the Puzzle part of it has been reduced to a bland sideshow, leading to a game that barely keeps its head above water.