Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent, released 2010 and Puzzle Agent 2, released 2011 by Telltale Games
i probably use GOG more than my friends do, most people do prefer steam after all. there's becoming less and less a gap between games released on GOG vs Steam (though GOG still has more of the oldies), so its not about exclusivity, i mostly just like that games on GOG are DRM free and i like the titles that get put up in their giveaways.
i was aiming to pick up some point and click games to play for the Halloween season and Puzzle Agent came up in the results. i am not a Telltale games aficionado, though many of the games would seem to be up my alley, none of the game properties that they made games for were enough to grab my eye. i had no idea that Puzzle Agent existed so i was interested in what this particular game is about.
are these games detective fiction games? no, not really. did i also play them both in under a 24 hour period? yes, i did and after playing the first one i was inspired enough to start this review and then realized there was actually a sequel. they both left a taste in my mouth that i need to try to talk about lest it stick in my craw forever so here i am talking about them.
Content warnings for Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent and Puzzle Agent 2 are as follows:
Quick run-through of the plot
Tethers' office as it appears in both games.
Starting with the first game, Nelson Tethers is a part of the FBI's Puzzle Research Division, and its only member. the game starts with him reading the newspaper about the moon landing and dreaming that an astronaut is in his office and writes something down on the crossword he was going to solve: "Scoggins". before he can even contemplate that, he is called to engage in a field mission: going to Scoggins, Minnesota (Minnesota mentioned) and getting their eraser factory up and running again because the erasers they produce are used by the White House. any previous attempts to contact the factory has just returned odd puzzles so no one at the FBI even knows what happens.
Tethers travels out to Minnesota and is met with resistance, in the form of the being bizarre and obtuse people of Scoggins (save for the hotel owner). when he actually gets out to the factory to see what its condition is, he learns from the sheriff (who is also acting strangely) that there was some kind of unknown accident that caused a loud noise and the factory's foreman, Isaac Davner, didn't return home. the factory is sealed by a complex machine that is missing some components, and seems to be locked from the outside because of it.
The map of Scoggins, Minnesota.
Tethers suspects that Isaac is still inside the factory, something supported by the suspicious actions of Glori Davner, Isaac's wife, leaving food at the door of the factory. Tethers sees little gnome-like people poking at the food and when he tries to escape, has a dream of being in some kind of spaceship like building, with the view of space through one window, and a view of a forest through the opposite one. Isaac is there too, holding tightly to the hat of one of the gnome creatures.
the gnomes regularly appear to steal parts of the puzzles that Tethers is trying to solve and are seen talking to various townspeople.
the gnomes are later identified as "Hidden People" by the townspeople. the local lodge, The Brotherhood of Scoggins, seems to know about them but won't divulge any hard details about them. the leader, Bjorn, only tells Tethers that Isaac was "chosen".
after chasing after missing gear parts and evading being shot by the sheriff (whom he subdues by giving him a crossword to solve, the townspeople are obsessed with puzzles), Tethers makes it back to the factory and opens it up.
getting into the final room of the factory, Tethers finds Isaac barricaded inside. before he can do anything, the gnomes swarm inside and take Isaac away, jumping out the window.
Tethers returns to DC, the factory up and running again, and is commended by a colleague for solving the case. Tethers still has a bad feeling about it all, which leads us into the second game!
Agent Tethers reviews his notes from Scoggins while staring at the moon and sees the face of one of the Hidden People in it. he can't drop this case so after bidding farewell to a colleague in the Roots and Tubers Division (who will handle his work while he's gone), he heads back to Scoggins on a "personal trip".
the atmosphere of Scoggins is different and seems to be directly hostile toward him being back in town.
Tethers has another dream about an astronaut and a note is slipped under his door with "Isaac Davner does not exist!" on one side and a cryptic message on the other he can't yet solve.
outside Moose Ear Diner. they apparently serve lutefisk there.
the next day, he learns that other people have regularly disappeared from Scoggins and no one seems to do anything about it. Tethers doesn't get that far but Glori is willing to talk with him about what happened the last time he was here. she says that Isaac was troubled an The Brotherhood of Scoggins were going to help by putting Isaac on some kind of "spiritual journey" and she asserts that the Hidden People are not real. she tried to drown him before because it seemed he was going to stop this journey, but she affirms that The Brotherhood lied and have Isaac for some reason.
Tethers gets access to the missing peoples reports and puts together the lead via that note before, sending him to Makorka Teterdottir, a puzzle aficionado in town. and also a smoking hot babe.
Korka provides a newspaper clipping that shows a pilot named Ed Davis disappeared 16 years ago right before the first disappearance in Scoggins and he looks a LOT like Isaac Davner. Korka suggests that the disappearances are because Davner is a serial killer and has been responsible for all the disappearances, including that of her partner Halldor (Tethers tries to ask what their relationship was but Korka doesn't answer).
Korka (left, obviously) also has an accent i cannot place, it is not the stereotypical Minnesotan one that appears in the rest of the game that's for sure
Tethers tries looking into the area where Halldor disappeared and chases a lodge member he finds out there, only to stumble upon the body of an astronaut? he is cornered by the Hidden People and forced to flee before he can investigate it further.
Tethers tries to talk to Bjorn at the lodge but Bjorn reveals that all of the lodge members have gone missing, including the one Tethers saw yesterday who was looking for their current third member. the first to go missing from the lodge was Olav, an astronomer that was trying to discover a mathematical formula based on the phases of the moon to cure psychological disorders. after visiting Olav's cabin Tethers believes that this explains what's been happening and there was possibly a cover up! he tries to go to Korka about it but she's actually just obsessed with human-bigfoot hybrids and doesn't listen to anything he says.
Olav's cabin.
consulting with the local anthropologist, they discover that all the sightings of the Hidden People were reported during a penumbral eclipse and by using this data they triangulate where the Hidden People's location should be. Tethers gets separated from the anthropologist and comes across what looks like a person in a space suit roasting a squirrel over a fire with a crashed moon lander nearby. Tethers tries to flee when he thinks he's been spotted but is caught by the astronauts and injected with something so he passes out.
Tethers wakes up in his bed at the hotel. when he tries to leave the hotel, the FBI director commends Tethers for finding something in town while agents dressed in black suits populate Scoggins. He tells Tethers to take a real vacation now and drop the case.
Tethers locates the astronaut body from before (its actually just an empty suit) but also encounters Isaac. Isaac says that he was a part of a moon mission with two others who were to put some kind of weapon module on the moon, but due to the eclipse that occurred his crewmates went mad so he had to lock them in the module and abandon the mission, causing them to crash in Scoggins. he tried to start his life over, but his crewmates have continued to be insane out in the wilderness of Scoggins this whole time. Isaac believes the Hidden People that took him are trying to get him to destroy the module.
the two of them go to the site of the lunar lander and the men in black are already all over the place. Tethers deduces that this site is actual the home of the Hidden People and they can't return so long as the module is there. Tethers tries to disable it but is caught by the agents and locked in his hotel room. he gets a call from this colleague who has been reviewing his tapes and found one with the Hidden People whispering on it and Tethers realizes that same sound was playing under a recording of Olav's research he heard earlier and summons the Hidden People by playing the recording.
Tethers has a vision of floating in space and assisting the Hidden People with puzzles. he then finds himself half naked and crazed at the weapon module, attempting to disable it. his efforts just reactivate it and it zaps a few agents in the area, turning them into lunatics. Tethers is zapped too but still maintains the will to destroy it and runs off with the module. he tries to throw it into the lake, but its frozen over. a bigfoot-like creature appears and roars loud enough to shatter the ice so the module falls through, destroyed.
the game ends with Tethers confident that this mystery is solved and receives a postcard from the reunited Davners as they're on vacation in Bermuda.
im not leaving out any extra details, the game literally jumps from Tethers seeing the bigfoot to him being in DC. cool.
gameplay
the typical screen layout of the puzzles in the first game.
i'd liken these games to the Professor Layton series in design and puzzle structure. you explore the world by tapping on people or objects to investigate them that will either result in a conversation or present a puzzle to solve. the puzzles you get in these games are a bit more diegetic than they are in Layton games (at least in the first game, there's a couple of non-diegetic puzzles in the second game), but they still have you doing silly things like "solve who won the arm wrestling contest" or "draw lines around these bugs in a box to quarter them off based on this set of rules".
you can also tap around in order to pick up chewed gum, Tethers apparently thinks better when he chews gum, and there's no fresh gum around... so i guess the hint coins of Layton games is turned into... chewing pre-chewed gum that has been stuck to a surface for god knows how long. you spend these chewed gums as hints you can use while solving a puzzle, up to three times per puzzle. in the first game i think the amount of gum you can collect is fixed, much like Layton hint coins, but in the second game you can return to areas and pick up more gum.
your puzzle solution is then graded on how many hints you used and how many times you were wrong to give you a score out of 10 stars. from that you're given a letter grade. another funny part is each puzzle you solve gives you how many taxpayer's dollars were used to solve the puzzle, which goes up the more times you attempt a solution at a puzzle since every puzzle you solve gets submitted to DC to see if you're correct. (it is more expensive for a single solution in the second game since all your puzzle solutions are being routed through that aforementioned Division of Roots and Tubers.)
the grades don't seem to award any amount of points, though cumulatively they change your overall score of your game's profile. this means that if you constantly get A scores on your puzzles you'll get titles like i ended PA2 with: Prodigious Puzzle Genius.
the puzzles in PA2 are a bit more complex and clearly improve upon the model that they had in PA1. there's more ways to interact but still a few repeated puzzle patterns. i think there are overall more puzzles in PA2 too.
the ways of post-game content are that the puzzles you missed are now available for you to just play without having to go back through the story in order to find them again, which i appreciate.
all the pieces together
so there's a lot of aspects of this game that i want to address, like its art, who made it, how they made it, and some other stuff.
this is a game made by Telltale Games, who's business model up until 2018 operated under mostly developing and publishing point and click adventure games, usually working with licensed properties. the notable ones people would be aware of are The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Minecraft. their Sam and Max and Batman games also have quite a bit of a following. another part of their model was releasing more content for a game's story as "episodes" which was cited to try to mimic the release schedule of say a TV show which most of their game properties were originally.
Puzzle Agent and Puzzle Agent 2 are technically standalone games, but could be seen as operating as a 2 episode game release. the way this game operates, it wouldn't need more than two installments, and i'd say there's probably and equal amount of unanswered questions at the end of either game, even though PA2 serves to answer a lot that happened in PA1.
i know i've seen these floating around on tumblr before. you can get these as prints here
the other part of this game is that the art is all done by Graham Annable. you've probably seen his work around the block if you've followed comics news or been around on tumblr. i think Annable's at is very charming and i love the shapes he uses to construct body forms. the Hidden People featured in the game have appeared in other pieces of Annable's work and the game states that its based on his Grickle comics, however i don't think that Nelson Tethers really existed before this game so its interesting that this might be the most "original" Telltale game, save for their poker games.
the way the art is rendered in the game does leave a little to be desired, no sprites were redrawn for close-up shots so you can see the grain of the pencil/pen that were used to draw the character. there's very limited animation in the first game (the second game gets more to work with), so shots feel very... comic-like as characters move along scenes in stunted frames rather than with smooth movement and 3 frame idle animations. it was never too distracting to witness, but it did become very stark in the second game where Tethers is chasing after a character who has a run cycle of probably 10 frames and Tethers has about 4 frames in his own.
in my opinion these games could not work without Annable's design driving the operation. his style is absolutely perfect for the tone of the story and the simple expressions of the characters as they change and animate through conversations really conveys a lot of feeling.
being "based on a comic" this game also doesn't commit what i feel is a sin of media adapted from comics/inspired by comics media which is lean really hard into the "comic aesthetic". namely framing things as comic panels using other comic framing devices, like acting like everything is on a page in a book. the game does use speech bubbles to convey spoken text, but that feels like a relative standard outside of comics language anyway so there's nothing wrong with it. i know i say this while Telltale made The Wolf Among Us, also based more directly on a comic book property but as far as i'm aware, outside of the art stylization, also lets the game breathe as a game and not always call to its comic origins.
the inspirations for this game are very clearly things like Twin Peaks and Fargo. i have only seen up until about halfway through of season 2 of Twin Peaks but i think that's still enough to understand the vibe that this game was going for. these games also have strange dream-vision sequences that aren't really explained and provide the protagonist some context or preempt a future situation. i've not watched Fargo but it's impossible not to know things about it while living in Minnesota, but that means i can't speak to any specifics to that particular inspiration.
something that came up during research is that PA1 was made for Telltale's "pilot program" and was the launch title for it. this seems like some kind of internal project to experiment with creating different kinds of games, which feels appropriate since PA1 feels very different than any of the games that preceded it. i can't find any other reference to any other games made for the pilot program, so it might've started and ended with PA1, but they still made a sequel! and it feels kind of... bad if this was the only game that came out of it.
these games were made with the Telltale Engine, a proprietary tool to make their point and click games. from what i've been reading about it, it seemed really clunky and hard to use, but it was also a tool initially made in the early-mid 2000s. it didn't have a way to deal with physics and as time went on it became increasingly buggy on newer hardware. the engine didn't see an overhaul until 2016 with one of the Walking Dead games. being games made in 2010 and 2011, i didn't see as many of the rough edges of this engine though i did encounter some bugged rooms and instances more so in PA2, however they weren't gamebreaking and i did things the story wasn't pointing me to so it was understandable. but this being the first in-depth kind of interaction with the engine it definitely feels... clunky. it felt perfectly serviceable for the slow pace of the two games, but i could see it kind of getting out of hand if anything more octane was happening in any of the scenes.
unanswered questions
ok so. i had that previous section to just ruminate on the game's faculties before i brought up this: no questions are ever really answered in PA1 and PA2. is that a bad thing? well. i'm not quite sure.
i'm usually for narratives and stories leaving something still on the table, not really answering all the questions you might have so you can ponder and speculate on the nature of the finer, unspoken details. a story that tells you everything isn't really a good story in my opinion.
there's a lot to ruminate on with Puzzle Agent. are the Hidden People actually real or are Tethers and Isaac just hallucinating the whole time? what's the deal with the "weapon module"? how the fuck did those two astronauts survive out in the Minnesota wilderness for 15 years? (this might be because they were killing people and eating them but then) why the fuck were none of the disappearances in Scoggins looked into that deeply? why the fuck is the sheriff so fucking bad at his job?? what was the resolution of all those agents in Scoggins??? if the Hidden People were barred from returning to their home for 15 years why did they try to kidnap Isaac only after 15 years????
this sheriff is literally one of the most enigmatic figures of these games. and there's literal mythical gnome people in them.
the thing is, there's like so much left on the table but hidden from view about explaining how certain plot points developed or how Tethers got somewhere that it feels kind of... empty at the end. i don't know if i feel good that everything is "wrapped up" with the eraser factory back up, the Davners on vacation, the Hidden People can return home, and Tethers back in DC.
i wasn't really pleased with the route of the idea of mental disorders being caused by the moon and there being a general sense of "lunacy" as a plot point, mostly for the reasons obvious to us in the year 2024. there's a lot to these games where hallucinations, dreams, and mysterious visions comingle so its hard to know what is influencing what. its a bit fantastic like that, in the sense of the root word being "fantasy" which isn't bad, but it leads to a lack of cohesive storytelling on the part of the games in my opinion.
multiple characters kind of devolve into strained whispering and muttering to themselves like this guy here.
its maybe for the inspirations that drove this game that there isn't a lot of "mystery solving" being done, but similarly there isn't a lot of mystery solving in a Layton game either. you're able to speculate on the end result as much as you want but you kind of are there to accompany Tethers on his journey and just solve the puzzles when they come up.
these games are mystery games in the same way that Twin Peaks is a murder mystery TV show. it is, emphatically, by definition, but it also feels like its more about artistry and mood and themes than it is concerned with the player making inferences and deductions about the nature of the story. but the way that Twin Peaks thrives where the Puzzle Agents don't is that there's a lot more of a chance to speculate on its more esoteric elements and overall design. Tethers has dreams of astronauts and then finds out that Isaac was an astronaut, there isn't a whole lot of derivative thought involved with that. its like baby's Twin Peaks-Layton. in Minnesota.
but even after all that, i still think that you should play Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent and Puzzle Agent 2. i did really enjoy these games as a Layton series enjoyer and a Minnesota resident (lol). but i think they're still well put together games with fun and charming art and puzzle design. they're silly in a way that isn't grating and the humor is very subdued but present. i'd say they're good games, even if a lot of my words in the previous paragraphs might've indicated the opposite. they're good. i promise.
future on
i mentioned The Wolf Among Us earlier in this review and while that's more directly a detective fiction game, it seats itself more in the noir genre than anything else. outside of the content i've gleaned about the game through cultural osmosis, i'll be frank, i don't really like the noir genre all too much so unless i become desperate for some kind of detective media i'll be unlikely to play that game and its sequel (if it ever gets released but who knows what the future of Telltale looks like at this point).
this review is already long enough and it'd be unrelated to talk about my beef with noir and i'll save it for a more appropriate occasion.
call to action: if you're a Professor Layton fan, go play Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent its a good one. if you like it, go play Puzzle Agent 2. both games will only cost $15 total if you buy them at once and even less if you get them on sale.
if you're a fan of anything else go read The Valley of Fear, the Sherlock Holmes novel. thats also a good one but not quite a detective fiction novel to the same degree of the other stories.
extra fun stuff
ok now i'm getting in the habit of doing this, here are some early screenshots of Puzzle Agent, documented on Adventure Corner. i tried to include their final art in-game within this review so you can see how much stuff has changed!
Tethers' office
Map of Scoggins, Minnesota
Outside the Moose Ear Diner