Agent A: A puzzle in disguise
It's a casual puzzle/adventure game made for mobile devices, but I played it on PC. The first time I tried it, I thought it was weird and clunky and immediately gave up on it, but I guess I also wasn't really in the mood for it. Tonight, I gave it a second chance and completed it in one sitting.
What marred my impression at first were two things: First of all, the presentation is very cartoony, light-hearted, maybe even a bit cute, so it looks like a harmless, family-friendly game, and for the most part it is, but it's also casually cruel or dark at times, which seemed a bit at odds with the tone of the game (nothing graphic, but e.g. it starts with the "flirty" female spy you're after murdering your boss - and possibly others - in a ship bombing). Second, you navigate and solve puzzles by clicking only, without any visible or named hotspots - you have to find them by clicking, too. They are things that stand out, so it's not much of an issue, but it takes getting used to a bit. Also, it often displays text when you click on things and the text just stays until it's replaced by other text, but it doesn't pause the game, like other adventures do, and being used to those traditions, at first I always thought I had to click the text away (which is neither possible nor necessary).
Anyway, that being said, once you get into it, it's quite enjoyable. The puzzles are all pretty easy and simplistic, but I thought that was fine. You should hold pen and paper at the ready though, as the game won't store any codes or clues for you, you have to write them down. The story is simple and predictable, graphics and spoken text are somewhat basic, too, and some puzzles repeat themselves (memorize and copy patterns, find out the right order of pressing buttons by trial and error, collect x hidden parts of y), but that's alright for a game like this. The overall atmosphere, locations and little animations/cutscenes, as well as the casual difficulty were enough for me to stay motivated. Near the end I got a bit impatient and checked a walkthrough once or twice to learn where to go next, just because I was fed up with all the backtracking, which gets a bit much in the second half. It's not really walking, just clicking through a couple of rooms (left mouse one room forward, right mouse one room backwards) and it only takes a few seconds every time despite some animations, but it's not really fun to constantly go to and fro, and you're risking to forget about things due to all the repetition. There would really have been no need for a walkthrough otherwise, though.
All in all, it was a neat little distraction, a very decent casual adventure game, like what HOGs would play like without the hidden object screens (which always feel out of place to me in HOGs). It took me between 4 and 5 hours, without rushing anything (and including all that backtracking which artifically prolonged the game a bit).
It's seriously overpriced on PC though, almost 4 times as much as the mobile version costs, and more costly than some of the greatest fullblown indie adventure games or the old classics. Thankfully, I got it in a low tier Humble Bundle.
Post edited March 06, 2021 by Leroux