Agent A: A puzzle in disguise

I own this on PC. Just passable. Although fully 3D, it plays a bit like the original Myst -you are standing in a fixed spot in the room and click to either interact with something or have the camera smoothly hover to a new fixed spot. The constant backtracking within some of the more complex rooms made experimentation too painful. Pros: -Nice and clean art style with no pixel hunting -Simple inventory -It's subjective, but I liked the voice acting and cutscenes -To my knowledge, no instant-death; good save system -Lots of inventory-based puzzles. Sadly... Cons: -No pixel hunting but you still have to click every single item, because you need to interact with some non-obvious things in order to advance, and I don't mean "it's a hidden switch" things. -Your own character has no voice acting, which would help immersion if he/she didn't have snarky written dialog anyway, which detracts from it. -The plot is generic, which I wouldn't mind if they ran competently with it: telegraphed twists, uneven character development; it's obvious this game was meant to just introduce a larger franchise, which obviously didn't happen, leaving you unfulfilled. -The first two chapters start okay -to advance you examine the environment for clues and missing objects, but from the third chapter onwards things get overcomplicated; it feels as if they realized the game would be too short and artificially expanded the puzzles to pad it with quantity, not quality. This is where backtracking becomes awful -you dread experimentation because you have to zoom in, then backtrack, then zoom in again, and repeat until you get it right. At this point I read the walkthrough, but even knowing what to do it was too bothersome to do it, because of the backtracking. If you just want to solve puzzles and don't mind backtracking, this is okay on sale; if you also want a good plot (by puzzle standards) and encouraged experimentation, you should probably look elsewhere.

Gah, but this is a fun little adventure game that can really double as an escape room you play in the comfort of your own home. It kind of reminds me of Myst, but what I *really* like about this game is, everything is intuitive. There is rarely a time when a puzzle felt counterintuitive. Yes, maybe that means the game is a little easy, and sure, I finished it pretty fast, but I like that there was never a puzzle that felt out of place or required a weird solution. When you finally figure out solutions to stuff, you're like, OK, now I get it. And I found myself just going from puzzle to puzzle until I found that item that I needed, and then I'm like, yep, I know exactly what I'm gonna do with this. So yeah, this is a great adventure game. It might be short, but as long as you wait for a decent sale to come along, there are FAR worse ways to spend a few bucks for a few hours of enjoyable fun. Well done, Yak & co..

Overall I enjoyed this. It was short and can be completed in a couple of sittings (disclaimer: if I hadn’t got it on sale for £1.59 I would have been a bit let down), but I still recommend it as it was fun and really do hope for a sequel. PROs: + The art style, music and voice acting was all great. +The story was a casual light hearted spy thriller with a fair amount of humour (I appreciate that some people felt the story was shallow, but I wasn’t expecting a grand cinematic universe from a puzzle game). + There were logical puzzles (some basic item use and some pattern/button type puzzles) which were sometimes quite easy but still satisfying to figure out. There was only one puzzle towards the end of the game where I got a bit fed up & felt that where I had to go next was unclear, but otherwise enjoyable gameplay. (I accept the criticism that it lacked the challenge of older Sierra/Lucas Arts point and clicks, but I’ve had to remove my nostalgia goggles for them in recent years and wonder if it was really ‘fun’ to guess at where exactly to stand to trigger an event or which convoluted item combination would create an unforeseeable reaction). CONs: - Can’t always tell where you can go (some screens you can go to the left, right or walk closer to an object/part of the room but from the image you’re looking at it’s not always obvious and there’s no pointer change/highlighting to let you know). - As I said above, it’s very short, would have felt a tad cheated if I’d bought at full price. I usually prefer games where I’ve got a character moving around the screen rather than first person style like this, but I can easily look past it when I’m actually entertained (something that’s often missing from the frustrating older point and click adventures which I’ve become irritated with in recent years). Even if there’s not a direct sequel I still like the developers style and will keep an eye out for anything else they make. I hope others get as much out of it as I did.

The puzzles in the first chapter or two are easy and uninteresting, but they do pick up in difficulty a bit later on. As you progress, the world map opens up and many puzzles require a lot of backtracking. Coupled with a fairly slow transition between locations and no quick movement system, this quickly becomes rather irksome. Other than that, this game was..fine. The plot and setting are a pretty generic spy motif and the writing is somewhere between passable and uninteresting. Overall, I'd say your time would be better spent playing something else. This game doesn't bring anything new to the table and fails to bring any modern conveniences to smooth out the gameplay.

#Summary (55%): Most puzzles are okay for a casual game and the story is passable, but the game lacks too many convenience features, has a sluggish pace, and the puzzles can be tedious. There is a very good chapter in the middle, but that is Agent A's only real merit. #Review: Agent A is a fun adventure game, assuming you have never played any point-and-click since the original version of the first Myst. The first thing you will remember about it is the ridiculous amount of backtracking and transition scenes, as there is no map, quick-travel, or anything similar. Combine it with the complete lack of hints, journals, or anything that would help the player, and you get a game where you either use a walkthrough or accept that you will spend 80% of your time travelling without doing anything useful. Even when I remove all this inconvenience, the rest of Agent A is mediocre at best. The puzzles hover between the quality of a bad hidden object game and a lazy mobile adventure. In themselves, none of them is terrible, but they repeat too much (especially the "guess the combination" types). The story is just your Saturday morning cartoon spy stuff with charmingly dumb humour. It is okay and entertaining all right, but it is also predictable, it takes ages to get anywhere, and in the end, it is utterly forgettable. However, I am giving it three stars, because the third chapter was genuinely awesome. It is a puzzle box/escape room scenario, and it was the only segment where I felt the developers were at least trying to give something for our money beyond a weak 3D hidden object game.