Indie Smarts Pack II

Following on from my thoughts on the first two games of the Indie Smarts Pack from Steam, I've spent some time on two more games from the pack.

Puzzle Agent is an "adventure" game by Telltale Games who are probably most famous for their Sam & Max episodic adventures (which I've rather enjoyed but are not to everyone's taste). Like normal adventure games, Puzzle Agent, will see you wandering between locations, talking to characters and solving puzzles to progress the plot. Unlike normal adventure games however, the puzzles are generally logic-type puzzles that are abstracted out of the game and have little or no direct relevance to what's happening in the story. To be fair though, this is the game's conceit. You are an agent for the FBI's Puzzle Research Division, specially trained for all the bizarre puzzles that seem to be rife within Scoggins, Minnesota.

Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent

Once you get past the bizarre story, strange graphics and linear progression, you're just left with the puzzles. I really enjoyed these kind of puzzles from puzzle books while I was in primary school and some of the puzzles in this game can be quite fun to solve. But the puzzle difficulty is about the same - only really appropriate for younger kids. Every single puzzle was solved on the first try except for a few cases where the instructions were unclear. With solving all the puzzles I could find, I finished it in 3 hours. So way too easy; way too short.

Typical puzzle mid-way through the Puzzle Agent

Puzzle Dimension is a maze-like puzzler where you have to move your ball through a 3D maze-like platform, passing through each special tile (marked with sunflowers) en route to the destination portal. The challenge mostly comes from the special tiles that make up the gameplay area: you can't stop your ball on ice tiles, some tiles can only be crossed once before crumbling beneath you, etc. You'll have to carefully plan out a route needed to reach all sunflowers and the portal keeping all the special tiles in mind.

And added to the above is the three dimensional nature of the puzzles (hence the "dimension" in the game's name). Although you have only 5 moves for your ball (forward & back, left & right, jump), the gameplay area itself curves through three dimensions with gravity changing to be relative to your ball's current orientation. Since the maze isn't constrained by walls, this allows you to do things like drop off the edge of your current tile onto another tile in a completely different part of the puzzle.

Puzzle Dimension - an early level

Solving the puzzles is good fun and the 3D aspect of the game certainly sets it apart from similar free flash games I've seen. Although earlier puzzles don't really use the 3D much, it is soon incorporated to push up the puzzle difficulty by a significant factor. The levels in a given set get a bit samey, but you can easily enjoy short sessions of a few puzzles at a time.

The final game in the pack is Droplitz. Unfortunately I have been unable to get this to run on my PC :(

Final summary of my thoughts on all 5 games:

• Lumines - Gameplay 9/10 (fun!), Difficulty 5/10 (only challenging under time pressure)
  
• QuantZ - Gameplay 4/10 (sparkly but annoying), Difficulty 3/10 (may get harder in later levels)
  
• Puzzle Agent - Gameplay 6/10 (some puzzles are fun), Difficulty 1/10
  
• Puzzle Dimension - Gameplay 7/10 (fun in short bursts but lacks real variety), Difficulty 8/10 (puzzles are nicely challenging straight after the tutorial)
  
• Droplitz - Didn't work
  

Overall there are two good (and very different) games in the pack that you can play casually any time you feel like a quick brain workout. I'd especially recommend getting Lumines even at its $9.99 Steam price.