Review by: Neilie Johnson

Among comics fans, artist Graham Annable is known mainly for his minimalist cartoon Grickle. Among adventure game fans, Annable's known as the former creative director of episodic adventure game company Telltale Games, makers of the Sam & Max and Tales of Monkey Island series. However he's known, Telltale's banking on the artist's unique vision to carry their newest game title, Puzzle Agent. Unfortunately, not even Annable's wit and visual humor can prop up what's ultimately a sluggish tree-sloth of a game.

Puzzle Agent follows special agent Nelson Tethers (of the U.S. Department of Puzzle Research) to the company town of Scoggins, Minnesota where something's gone terribly wrong at the eraser factory. A local man's been inexplicably locked inside the factory and it's up to agent Tethers to figure out how to get him out. The game functions much like the Professor Layton games, or more recently, the Blue Toad Murder Files; in between interviewing the ahem...colorful locals, agent Tethers looks for clues by solving various logic and shape-recognition puzzles. Unlike Blue Toad, you have as much time as you need to solve these puzzles and you can access hints to them by picking up (ew) chewed wads of gum found stuck all over the environments. The puzzles in Puzzle Agent vary in difficulty and offer enough variety to keep things interesting, but thanks to the glacial pace of the story and dialog sequences, getting to them can be a real chore.

Anyone who's seen Grickle knows that the Annable's idea of pacing is slower than most. The humor in the series is largely dependent on minimalist sight gags and the characters do a lot of furtive side-to-side glancing, seemingly to indicate their thought processes. The formula works for two minute animations, but when implemented as the transitions between the interactive elements of an hours-long game, it makes for a fairly dull experience. During dialog sequences, Agent Tethers and others often indulge in overlong pauses that make you want to click madly, just to move things along, and the almost total lack of musical soundtrack makes the game feel strangely dead and/or unfinished.

Another problem with the game's presentation comes from the attempt to translate Annable's sketchy line-art style directly, rather than considering the needs of an interactive game. The game's graphics look like Annable's sketches scanned and blown up, which makes the lines around everything look fuzzy in an ugly way. The effect is at the same time both too organic and too mechanical-looking, since the line widths on things don't vary and things look particularly bad when seen in close-up.

On paper, Puzzle Agent probably seemed to Telltale like a sure thing. With Annable's New Yorker-style drawings and wry humor, it likely seemed that to create a great game, all they needed to do was toss in a few logic puzzles. The thing is, as happens so often when artists cross media, (think Neil Gaiman's underwhelming Mirrormask) it just doesn't work. If you're a puzzle fan, then the game does have some thought-provoking puzzles; however, it moves so slowly, you might not be able to stay awake long enough to get to them.