Agent A (2019)

[tozka]

Agent A: A Puzzle in Disguise (2019) is a point-and-click puzzle adventure game with a SPY theme! You play as a genderless secret agent trying to track down international spy Ruby La Rouge, who recently blew up your boss and is threatening to blow up your coworkers. I played the Nintendo Switch version.

The basic game is to click through a set of rooms looking for clues to solve puzzles to move the storyline along. I enjoyed the brightly-colored locations, the background music, and the subtitles for any speaking parts. The puzzles were, for the most part, not too difficult to solve-- the built-in screenshot button on the Switch definitely helped me keep track of clues I found three rooms away. Some of them were really fun, like dialing a phone to call a spy supply store to get a thing to solve the next-to-last puzzle.

I think I only had to look for help two or three times, and only because I couldn't figure out that there was another path off to the side of one screen. Most of the puzzles involved finding pieces in interesting places and bringing them back to a main location to unlock the next part of the game.

Which brings me to my main problem: actually DOING that is really annoying, because you can really only solve MAYBE two puzzles at a time. That means clicking through ALL the rooms looking for one specific kind of clue, clicking back to the solution room, unlocking the next puzzle, and then repeating it all over again.

I found myself going 10 rooms away, picking up one clue, and then backtracking ALL the way back to put it in the thing and unlock the next part of the game, which meant going BACK 10 rooms to get to the newly-opened part of the game. Over and over again. NOT fun.

However, there's a dedicated button to backing out of a room, which did make things easier. But backtracking is never fun, tbh, and this could've been fixed by just carrying around the item that the clues go into.

That said, overall I did enjoy playing this game. It took maybe four hours to beat? I recommend using a stylus to speed some of the point-and-clicking up-- or just grabbing the mobile version, I suppose.

Price: $19.99, but I bought it on sale for $2 which it does pretty frequently.

Originally posted at my personal journal.