The Agency: Chapter 1 Reviews

>sci-fi steampunk visual novel okay sounds pretty interesting, maybe I'll add it to my wishlist >character named Fio that's my name ?! holy shit I gotta buy this [strike]will update with an actual review later[/strike] Okay! Time for a brief rundown: [*] [b]Story[/b]: Political intrigue, conspiracies, a missing person, and a stolen jewel! All together, enough to keep me interested and make me want the other chapters. [*] [b]Dialogue[/b]: Unfortunately, this made the game drag. It was very wooden most of the time and tended to info-dump. [*] [b]Art[/b]: Loved the backgrounds! I also enjoyed the pictures used for the puzzles, very appropriate for the steampunk setting. [*] [b]Gameplay[/b]: The choices didn't affect anything as far as I know (except maybe minor bits of dialogue), but this isn't the first visual novel I've played that's done that, so I'm not too disappointed. The woodblock sliding puzzles were a nice break from the dialogue (they don't make much sense as a codebreaking method tho, and the explanation felt pretty contrived....) Overall, good way to spend a couple hours, and worth the price.

Not bad. Although I can't identify with the lead/main character at all and the narration-voice is very... odd. The puzzles are fun so far, but nothing spectacular. The characters are not very likeable, at least not to me and have a personality of a cartboard-cut out ( tha's also how they look ). Also, the dialogues are borderline cringeworthy For the price it's an o.k. game though and I would recommend it for casual gaming.

[h1] A Game Without Heart or Soul [/h1] This game was hard to get through. At first I was worried because it felt very slice of life in the pace of the game which I can have a hard time with unless it's a really good story. However it started to sink in that the reason that I was having a problem with the pacing is because of all of the fat left in the story. In an anime we call them "filler content/episodes" things that aren't necessary. It's anything that you can cut from a story and the reader doesn't lose anything by not having it there, we practiced this in school. In the writing process it's the job of the editor to tell the writer to cut the fat from the story so that the reader doesn't die of boredom from reading it. So either this game didn't have an actual editor or they need a new one. The characters also lack individual voice, if you removed the names from the dialog you wouldn't be able to tell who was saying what because they all come from the same voice with different labels. It has no heart or soul in it which makes it very bland to read, added with all the fat it's a perfect train crash. Randomly there will be a kind of monologue which is voice acted (kind of poorly mind you), it is the most interesting part of the game though. Maybe the whole game would be better if it was voice acted as well. The art could be better, but I won't fault an indie game for that, what you see in the trailer is what you get. Character that are drawn alright with backgrounds that are very hit or miss. The music became a bit of a bother since they waited later in the game to bother changing it at all, that or the tracks sounded so similar that I couldn't tell which is even worse. In particular it didn't sound "bad" a new song for different areas or something would have been nice though, it just about put me to sleep. The puzzles.. I am a puzzle fan, Hidden object games, matching games, gem games, sliding puzzles, even games that are exclusively jigsaw with no other game play. I really like puzzles of almost any kind. This games puzzles just looked really boring though. Besides that the mechanics of the puzzles were awful. You have to like click and drag the puzzle pieces to the side like a sliding puzzle, except 1/3rd of the time it doesn't register that it should do it. However unlike a sliding puzzle that have some level of difficulty you're basically just swapping pieces like a bad joke of a jigsaw puzzle which counts your moves and tells you after. That doesn't matter though since it effects nothing, there's no score board or fewest possible moves score or anything, just a useless piece of information to do nothing with. Since the puzzles also have so few of pieces and you just swap them amongst each other there's no difficulty to it. You just swap them until it's done and that's it, you can't fail and there is no meaning. The "game features" portion of the Steam page for this game is a joke as well. "thrilling" story? No. "High Quality" art? Indie at best. "Brilliant" and "inspired" music? Not really. "Fantastic" style and theme? It's themed but I mean.. it's okay at best. "addictive puzzle mini games"? That's the most laughable part of it. There's a thing called over selling yourself, if you claim things and sell them you have to be able to deliver. This Steam page for the sale of the game is great, it's the most brilliant part of the game as a whole and I'd say most of the budget probably went into the trailer alone which makes the game look great. So bravo to the marketing team honestly, they're the true MVPs here. The only way I could justify this games existence though is if it were free. It's not worth purchase. [h1] Pros: [/h1] +Interesting random vocal monologues +Some pretty landscape images +Good advertising on store page [h1] Cons: [/h1] -Bland lifeless story/writing -annoying but extremely easy puzzles with boring art -pointless move counter on the puzzles -Choices are meaningless,

I should have read the description more closely. The "addictive puzzle mini game" is a sliding picture puzzle. I hit the first one in the game and quit. It was 4x4 I think. The game includes bad voice acting early on as well, so get ready for that.

I guess this is supposed to be kind of a mix of a steampunk themed novel and a puzzle game. The mix seems pretty forced. You're a "codebreaker" who "cracks woodshells." Basically what you do is rearrange a bunch of 4X4 tiles to make a picture because apparently that's a skill only a select few people possess. Supposedly this is some sort of data encryption. See, droids can decipher passwords so data needs to be hidden this way. Kind of like a steampunk physical captcha system. Oh, and it takes two people to do it so you have a partner who looks like a little girl with huge eyes and big cleavage because... you know... anime. Also, people are intimidated by her because she's tough. I'm not quite clear on her role in the whole "woodshell cracking" process but the story explained that she's the "hacker" and that that part is complicated and pretty darned important. But she does it extremely quickly and completely without your help so you can concentrate on all that tile moving stuff, so that's a relief. Honestly, the puzzles have a neat looking art style and although it isn't particularly challenging it's kind of relaxing to do them. In fact, it wouldn't be too bad a little diversionary game if the puzzles weren't just used as a thinly veiled excuse to break up the exposition. And there's a LOT of exposition. Imagine a book, but it's all dialogue, you have to click after EVERY line of dialogue (and during long sentences to make them type out faster because they print slowly to look cool,) and a lot of that dialogue is trite and pointless. "Did you sleep well?" "Yes." "The noise of the city didn't bother you?" "No." "That's good." "Yes." "The noise from the city bothered me when we first moved here to help Captain IForgetHisName with all the steampunk stuff I'm going to talk about in this extremely and unexpectedly long sentence that kind of came out of nowhere but I got used to it." "That's good." "Yes." I'm paraphrasing and exaggerating a lot, but speaking for myself I was not gripped by the story enough to be willing to either want to see what would happen or to click through to get to the puzzles. Truthfully I guess I got my $1.50 worth of entertainment out of it but I'm downvoting it because I don't want any of my friends to read this and say to themselves "Moose thought it was good." It ain't. On the plus side the music is nice and some of the loading screen art is extremely pretty.

I enjoyed this, once I got my head around what it is. It seems to be more of a visual novel with a (so far very relaxing) little puzzle game, but the world building is very interesting, and the characters are very likable, especially the protagonist. Atmosphere is a combination of steampunk, end of WWI, and private investigating. It's not exactly what I expected - I thought there'd be more puzzles, and a bit more player-interaction. That said, the art, story, and atmosphere are worth it for the price as long as it's at least sort of what you're looking for. TL;DR It's short, but interesting and well-conceived. Buy it if you don't mind VNs with fairly low player involvement.

A really short VN with a few puzzles. I liked the art style, but the lack of expression on the characters (maybe Fio had one or two expressions besides her normal one) was not nice. BGM was amazing, really addicting. I’ve played other titles from these developers before and I could see some improvements! The characters are more likable and the story itself is more elaborated too. I’m looking forward for chapter 2! 5/10.

Choices don't really matter in The Agency. If you are a fan of jigsaw puzzles and solving those, then you will enjoy the puzzles. Overall, the character development could have been a bit better but I liked the story. It was really short, but still decent. If it's on sale, give it a try.

“The Agency: Chapter 1” is the first installment in what probably will be an episodic game series (like how TellTale games do it e.g. Game of Thrones by TellTale Games, The Walking Dead by TellTale Games etc.) Unlike TellTale Games your decisions don’t bear any weight towards the ending and storyline. The decisions are more “aesthetic” than anything else and are more a means to get more information and immerse oneself better in the world of this game. This is what they call a “kinetic novel” where the story is linear. There is gameplay though, in the form of an image puzzle game. The story revolves around a young man named Jack Beckwith, who joins a detective agency in the capital of the fictional nation he lives in. Ok, so the facts are done, on to the review. Story When you’re doing this type of game, your story better be damn awesome. In that respect the game passes with flying colors! The writing is solid and the dialogue is very stylistic towards Victorian speech that really helps towards immersion. There is a whole and fully fleshed out fictional world that one can believe the characters live in. The characters themselves feel rounded and real and the mystery plotline that caries the game is intriguing. Art The sprites aren’t very good, perhaps the greatest failing of this game. The backgrounds on the other hand, are excellent and very stylistic. The general steampunk style behind the UI is very satisfying and should please even the most hardcore steampunk fan. Music The music was very appropriate towards the feel and the style of the novel. The melodies were nice and complemented the storyline and general emotions behind the piece. Minigame The VN has a minigame where you put a scrambled image together. It can get a bit tedious and repetitive at times but were in themselves generally harmless. Some of the images chosen were (perhaps purposefully chosen to be ) quite difficult due to the strangeness of the images (you’ll see when you play it yourself). Duration The game isn’t what they call long and given you’re not someone who does a lot of these image jigsaw puzzle things in their free time they may take a bit of time. The game has these nice little cutscenes, which also add to the duration, but all in all I’d say the game should take the average player around 2 hours. It ends with a cliffhanger, unsurprisingly Overall I liked it. It’s not the best Visual Novel in the world but it’s certainly not the worst. I enjoyed the 2 hours entertainment it gave me and am looking forward to seeing chapter 2.

I honestly don't have too much to say about The Agency. The plot and characfters both feel really underdeveloped, but I imagine that could be corrected in future volumes. So I guess at the core all I have to say is: if you really like jigsaw puzzles, you'll enjoy this game. I hate them, so I really could get basically no enjoyable what-so-ever. I feel like this is a make-it-or-break-it aspect, particularly given how exactly the puzzles are shoehorned into the narrative, thereby shattering immersion if they aren't your thing, as they aren't for me. To each their own, of course, and I can absolutely understand why some people might enjoy the game, but I simply found it an exercise in tedium.