Puzzle Agent 2 Review Thread

[richmcd]

I don't think I'd call it cheating, per se. But I agree it's certainly a poor design decision to make you minimise the game to solve something in it. Even if they forgot that not everyone is American for the coin puzzle, the sequence puzzle mentioned above surely requires outside knowledge for most people (I recognised the sequence, but had no idea what came next. I can't imagine I'd be alone in that position.)

Oh and I feel the same about the formula puzzle, which I think is assuming a level of familiarity with symbols that it's unreasonable to expect of the average player.

I just got the impression that they spent the absolute minimum time possible thinking up these puzzles.

[Jake]

Originally Posted by StrongBrush1

*Where are all of the other people who disappeared?
*What happened to Steve and Bjorn?

I thought that first bullet point was explained -- they came across the astronaut camp and were "dealt with," the same as the skiier. The hidden people weren't involved in the disappearances, and neither was Isaac or the Cult -- it was the Hermes II crew going crazy and/or still protecting their mission. I think Nelson makes mention of it in the cutscene when he first finds the astronaut camp, but maybe it doesn't reveal enough. :\

[Epic Kiwi]

Ohh, I thought that scene was implying the skier WAS one of the astronauts.

[Syd]

I have the same major complaint with Puzzle Agent 2 as I had with the first one: puzzle variety. The same puzzles are repeated too often, and there's just not enough variety overall. I found the story quite interesting, though I think the pacing was a bit off and Korka's voice acting could have been a bit better. I also didn't like the repeated use of assets from the first game, but I guess that's forgivable since it takes place in the same town.

I'd like to see this series improve, but the puzzles really need some extra work. I hope Puzzle Agent 3, if it is made, has much better puzzle variety.

I'd give Puzzle Agent 2 a 7/10.

[Krohn]

As another non american.
The coin puzzle was not quite as hard as some seemed to believe.

You were already told about the penny and the dime to be the coins in the boxes.
So it was easy to recognice those.

and the quarter was actually labeled as such.
That eliminated 3 coins at once..and since it looked like they were sorted by increasing value that made the coin to the furthest right the dollar.


Overall, I'm not sure if the puzzles were easier than in part one, or if I just got more used to think in the right way.


But either way, I want a 3rd installment.
Preferably in a new location. (And I don't care if there a hidden people..as long as there are good puzzles)



The only part of the game I didn't like was close to the end.
when Nelson was running to the lake.
Mostly because it wasn't a real puzzle but some annoying figure out what you see and move the mouse around fast enough
(And no, it's not that I have problems doing that..but if I want "action" sequences I play different games.)

[Soultaker]

Krohn: could you put some spoiler tags around the paragraph about the coins? This is the review thread; it's likely people read this thread before they have finished the game.

[henke37]

I still don't think there is enough information about the coins, I don't know what a dime or a penny is!

[lombre]

What?
Okay, it was absolutely wonderful for the first 3/4. Interesting story, perfect atmosphere, (mostly) good puzzles. As soon Isaac showed up, things went far too fast and made zero sense. Far too many loose ends that were completely ignored. It felt like you guys just ran out of time and tried to wrap it up asap.

[Nagaoka]

I just gotta say I loved the music in space. The entire feeling of that scene was just so great too. So bizarre, yet so calm and peaceful, with just the suggestion of what was REALLY going on.

I was a little disappointed that the end had that same sudden drop off as the first game. You're getting somewhere. Stuff happens. Excitement builds. Nelson's back in his office. Credits roll. Aww...

I dunno I just didn't get a sense that the lunar ray's destruction was the "important" goal or what we were waiting to do. So seeing that done and then the game ending because of it was just a tad bit anticlimactic. Especially cause I was wondering how Nelson even got his job back after ticking off the government agencies like that. The Hidden People! What about them? Did they go home or what? It seemed odd to just drop them like that, even if it would be addressed in a potential 3rd game. The lunar ray was keeping them from going home, yes, but to me the emphasis pre-lunar race was on them, not the ray itself. I dunno, maybe I'm not making a lot of sense here.

Alas, we'll have to wait for Puzzle Agent 3! I'm totally looking forward to it.

I liked the puzzles quite a bit in this one. I think they had better explanations overall and some like the split-river puzzles gave you visual aids you didn't have before, which made things friendlier. I actually used hints this time (I initially refused to use them, but those fake/real number sequences got me every time!)

The new characters were really interesting too! The anthropologist in particular was my favorite. He was SO meta. It was amazing.


The missing people, except Davner, were really all eaten? Wow. I know that point is made in the game, but there's so much emphasis on these "missing" people who you're told you must bring back that I guess it didn't fully dawn on me. Poor Darrel...."

[Krohn]

Originally Posted by henke37

I still don't think there is enough information about the coins, I don't know what a dime or a penny is!

Now that is a basic language barrier.
Use a dictionary.

[Cheeseness]

Originally Posted by Jake

I think Nelson makes mention of it in the cutscene when he first finds the astronaut camp, but maybe it doesn't reveal enough. :\

Hmmm... throughout the game, Nelson is drawing questionable conclusions. There's nothing to indicate that that theory was any more sound than the others. I also assumed that the skier was one of the astronauts, since they were eating squirrel rather than skier >_<

Originally Posted by Krohn

The coin puzzle was not quite as hard as some seemed to believe.
You were already told about the penny and the dime to be the coins in the boxes.
So it was easy to recognice those.

and the quarter was actually labeled as such.
That eliminated 3 coins at once..and since it looked like they were sorted by increasing value that made the coin to the furthest right the dollar.

I don't agree. In my country, size has nothing to do with denomination it's a pretty big assumption that the coins are arranged in any particular order. If you live in one of the two countries that still use non-decimal currency, I suspect it'd be even less obvious (err... I guess that's not so convincing a point these days).

Saying that players should get a dictionary out probably isn't very appropriate. Ignoring that interrupting the gaming experience isn't a good idea, how many non-US dictionaries have "dime" in them? I was surprised to find that one of my dictionaries did.

Edit: In the puzzle's defence, I really liked that it (like the Pi puzzle) appeared to be something different than it was, and that upon solving it, our reaction was "Ah ha!!!" rather than "That is a ridiculously hard puzzle". I don't think that would have been diminished by having number values under the coins that could be chosen from.

[taumel]

Meanwhile i had some more time to play to riddle #15.

The story slightly enhanced, additional characters are more convincing and appear less out of place, still the conversations somehow aren't really part of the gameplay. I love the music in the diner. I want to bomb the motel/hotel whatever, the woman gets completely on my nerves. Great: an astronaut suit and topics like astronomy and math! A few nice riddles but the majority still aren't convincing and some really suck badly. I find this very sad as it seems to be the bread and butter for such a kind of game, if it isn't the story. And not this challenging riddles/boring ones already were critisised in part 1.

[taumel]

I'm through... :O/

I do appreciate that the installation/registration worked this time, i had no crashes nor experienced major glitches. Kind of sad that you have to appreciate this at all.

I do appreciate the overall mood and the Grickle style.
I do very much appreciate a space/astronomy driven story, some screams and two great tunes.
I did not like the extremely poor puzzle design, the lack of interesting variety/any sense of a challenge or simply bad designed puzzles or some puzzles you can't control properly.
I did not like a few characters, the voices in a few cases weren't fitting to the characters, they had boring things to say, didn't play a real role, a few rather awkward animations, the whole bubble gum idea is nonsense the way it's implemented.
The story could have been way more interesting and come with some depth, less stereotypes, same with the characters.
Better integration of dialogues, story and puzzles would be welcome.
:

If i think about how long i played the game, it was over way too soon.

After Puzzle Agent and the feedback it got from the community i expected a lot more more than just this. It was kind of fun playing a Grickle game again but it always felt poorly designed (no idea if this was due to a lack of inspiration/talent/budget/... ). I would rate it with a 5/10. And if it wouldn't be about Grickle and space then ...

[Gambler_Justice]

Short review for a short game:
I feel like Puzzle Agent 2 was worse than it's predecessor in pretty much every way. Story wasn't quite as strong, puzzles weren't quite as good and I do believe this game was shorter as well. At least that's what it felt like, it might be due to the first game having harder puzzles. With that said it's still a reasonably good game. I was hoping for more but what I got was... satisfactory, at least. The "Grickle" atmosphere is there and for $10, that's good enough for me.

P.S. The tune from "We Sing the Forest Electric" kicking off at [a certain point of the game] was a nice touch.

[puzzlebox]

I was really looking forward to this game's release, and it didn't disappoint. Although it's not quite as good as its predecessor, Puzzle Agent 2 is a decent followup to Nelson's first trip to Scoggins.


The Puzzles

On the whole the puzzles seemed easier (and possibly less numerous?) than the first Puzzle Agent game, but there were certainly some good ones in there. I loved Cross the Streams - a nice extension of the usual "three animals crossing the river" puzzle. I got it wrong in all the ways I could just to see all the animals eating each other. Points for the Ghostbusters nod too!

I also liked 'Round the Cosmos, Lander Circuitry, and the two bonus robot puzzles. I'd probably love the King's Challenge if I was good enough to solve it.

My least favourite puzzle was the Coin Box... US people looking at a version using any foreign coins would probably have a similar reaction. The puzzle itself was a good one, but I feel that the international audience was definitely overlooked when the coin values weren't provided in the rules. Hitting the internet to look up US coins or going the trial-and-error route (while ranting internally about US-centrism) definitely breaks the mood a bit.


The Story

The story is pretty linear, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I felt like I was helping Nelson follow a trail of clues, rather than that the game was on rails.

The writers did a great job mixing creepiness and humour. Scenes like Director Jennings in the diner and Korka turning out to be bonkers are a nice counterpoint to the genuinely scary astronauts. There are also some cool throwaway references to Grickle cartoons like Sing the Forest Electric and Space Wolf. Little touches like that go a long way.

There was a lot going on towards the end of the game, and there were some parts of the story I didn't understand. What happened to the crazy astronauts? Are they still on the loose in the woods? Why did they inject Nelson with a sleeping drug and then... take him back to his hotel room? Or did the Hidden People save him? Why did the secret agents just stand by holding their guns while Nelson messed around with the lunar ray?

The two different endings were a nice addition, one that I really appreciate. It's satisfying to know that your success or failure in the final puzzle actually has some consequence on the outcome (even though we end up with the same result, just in a slightly different way).


On the whole I really enjoyed this game, and I'm very glad that Telltale got the chance to make it in between some of their bigger licences.

[Epic Kiwi]

Originally Posted by Cheeseness

I also assumed that the skier was one of the astronauts, since they were eating squirrel rather than skier >_<

Maybe the skier was actually THE SQUIRREL. Conspiracy!

[thom-22]

I have to say I was underwhelmed.

The puzzles were much easier and less interesting. The logic puzzles -- hotel room assignments and missing persons list -- were dead simple compared to those in PA1. There was one put-the-photos-in-order puzzle in PA1, fine for variety's sake. That puzzle scored about average in this poll, so why were there four of them in PA2? Same with the cut-through-the-chains puzzles. I like shape-sliding puzzles, but these were hardly challenging. There really weren't any new "wow" puzzles.

As for the story, it seemed to me that the tone changed when Korka went nuts and started talking about CIA suppression rays and then the men in black showed up. It's like it went from being an homage to eerie unexplained-phenomena fiction to a spoof. The narrative got muddled at the end, and, as others have said, it would have been nice to have had a denouement in Scoggins before jumping back to FBI HQ.

Ironically, I find that PA2's resolution totally vindicates PA1 as a terrific opening chapter for the story, setting up characters and foreshadowing events. Bo Murphy wasn't just babbling when he said, "The whispers of the moon crash too loudly… Clear the path.". I am becoming increasingly convinced that episodic gaming is a mistake, at least when the plot isn't naturally episodic. If there are to be any more Puzzle Agents, I would prefer to get a whole story, appropriate for the intended length of the game, with equal attention devoted to the beginning and the end and proper pacing throughout. On the other hand, the story hardly matters if the game doesn't bother to aspire to excellence in puzzle design.

[tbm1986]

Loved it up to and including the meeting with Isaac Davner. Music, art style, story, writing and voice acting all perfect up to that point. Then it got very warped and stayed like that.

The coin puzzle I got by guessing. I didn't even realise Americans called their 1c pieces pennies too. Had no clue what the other coins were, having never seen them before. I've lived in Britain all my life and we have coins where value and size don't correspond.

There were too few types of puzzles.

The last puzzle didn't say you need to use one continuous line!

The game ended on far too many loose ends and, what with Nelson ending up back in his office when by rights he should be sacked, if not jailed, it left me cold.

[Cheeseness]

Originally Posted by thom-22

I am becoming increasingly convinced that episodic gaming is a mistake, at least when the plot isn't naturally episodic.

The bit that concerns me is that Puzzle Agent 2 was meant to be a full game. It honestly didn't feel any longer than most of the S&M Season 3 and ToMI episodes.

That could be a by-product of the very directed feel of the game, though - instead of being encouraged to explore locations and follow our own instincts, which might have made the game feel bigger and ore open, we were prompted to go everywhere we needed to, and nothing seemed to be happening at alternative locations. For a game that seemed to be presenting red herrings and making you question things plot wise, the play experience was perhaps too linear (that may have suited BTTF, but IMO just doesn't feel right here).

Don't get me wrong though. I enjoyed and still would have purchased PA2 if I had've known what it would be like - I think the Puzzle Agent pilot was a lot stronger and set our expectations a little higher than Puzzle Agent 2 could stand up to.

[Pinchpenny]

Originally Posted by lombre

What?
Okay, it was absolutely wonderful for the first 3/4. Interesting story, perfect atmosphere, (mostly) good puzzles. As soon Isaac showed up, things went far too fast and made zero sense. Far too many loose ends that were completely ignored. It felt like you guys just ran out of time and tried to wrap it up asap.

Snap. I was loving it until this point; the ending felt far too rushed and the story became convoluted and hard to follow.