Hermie

What is the Mystery of Scoggins?

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Finished it and loved it, glad to see awesome current and ex Telltale people worked on it.

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I could easily be dead wrong about the usual telltale roster, I was under the impression from some light exposure to Sam & Max that they were fairly heavy on collecting inventory items and arbitrary solutions. Not necessarily combining items per-se, but wacky trial-and-error prone solutions. Maybe I'd like them more than I'd expect.

I don't know what "Adventure +" even is! Adventure games make up a very small percentage of the genres I play, it's true. Most of my experience is with hybrids- Other genres that have adventure elements or puzzles integrated into action or platforming stuff.

I'm pretty sure Kingz is just playing around with you, being an adventure veteran himself.

But yeah, I hate Myst style games. I've never understood the appeal. That said, I probably wouldn't care that much about the puzzle to puzzle format since it is also in many adventures I do like, but I think the overall art, atmosphere, and look of the Myst games is what puts me off more than anything. Too straight for me.

And now I'm going to stop posting in this thread because I haven't played Scoggins yet and I feel like a big asshole.

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Finished this today and I really enjoyed it. We didn't really have too much trouble with the puzzles, but it probably helped that there were two of us playing so we could bounce ideas off each other. We did get tripped up by the

last (lifts)

puzzle for the same reason as everyone else. The

bumper

puzzle wasn't bad because it looked pretty tough so we got a hint right away and it told us how many we needed to use. I read somewhere else that Jake said that they've talked about creating examples of how the mechanics work for future games. That would have been really helpful but it wasn't bad enough for me to dislike the game.

Going into it, I was pretty sure the puzzles were going to be really tough because of all of the Layton comparisons, so I really over analyzed a couple of them. The room key puzzle, for example:

I could see the N and then the second N but the last part looked like an = sign. So I was like, oh N is the 14th letter of the alphabet, it MUST be 28 since 14 + 14 = 28! And obviously that didn't work so I tried 14. Then I was like, oh N is 5 on a phone so it MUST be 10! Nope. Then I tried 5, then I tried 55, then I gave up and quit playing.

So we started over this morning from the beginning. We get to the room key puzzle and I'm sure my girlfriend is going to screw it up too. And she gets it right away. And I see the answer and do the biggest face palm ever. :(

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Aaand finished!

Thoroughly enjoyed, hoping more is on the way. As I recall Jake got some sort of UI-based credit? If so, wanted to post that the couple of people who have seen my play this have both remarked that the transitions and UI are particularly fitting and impressive.

I didn't check any thread spoilers until now, and in hindsight I gotta agree that there are mechanical/rules questions standing in the way of a straightforward solve on some puzzles. I don't mind some trail and error by itself, and I don't mind scoring penalties much by themselves, but that's a bit of a deadly combination. Sometimes found myself wondering if the hints would clarify any of the mechanics, and not using them because I didn't want to be docked.

In the end though, I got through most of the tricky ones fairly unscathed by forcing myself to overthink and put myself in the position of the puzzle's designer(s).

When it came to the ending, I was in agreement with some of the spoilered-out statements in the thread above, but then I went and watched some more of the Grickle shorts... I think it's quite an

abrupt and unfulfilling ending

for an adventure game in general, but it's

fairly pitch-perfect for a Grickle mystery

. Kind of breaks even at this point in my mind.

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Finished it today too as well. The UI was by far the best part of this -- the wooshing of letters and clicking of rotating digit indicators were extremely satisfying. I hope the focus for the sequel (if there is one -- I noticed this was a single game purchase rather than a full season) will be to make the "puzzle" engine more powerful and versatile. That is, the puzzles themselves would benefit tremendously from being snazzier, both while being solved and showing the solution. I wouldn't mind fewer of them if they had more custom stuff, animations, etc. I guess it's not going to happen, seeing as the sheer number of puzzles is the meat of it, and they have to be consistent, and they're fine as is.

As has been mentioned, some of the puzzle rules weren't made clear enough, and if the puzzle got more screen space we wouldn't have to toggle back and forth between the puzzle and a list of complex rules we need to know.

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Finally got around to playing Puzzle Agent a bit. I played the first half-hour of the game so far. Kinda bothers me that some puzzles are completely unrelated to the story. Regardless, digging it so far. A lot. It fulfills my expectations so far, regarding the atmosphere, the design, voice acting and music and the general feel of the game. Let's see how it progresses..

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In a fit of insomnia last night, I downloaded the demo of this game. I'm a huge telltale fan, but didn't really see myself liking a logic puzzle themed game. Although I like logic puzzles, I would prefer to buy a book of them than play a game, since I figured there would be a lot of game-based frustration.* However, the way the menu was presented, with each line representing a file opening was cool. I can't remember the last time a menu reflected the content of the game. The humour and horror also hooked me. Basically once the game popped up a tool tip that said

"Talk to the Creepy Guy"

, I was sold. I bought the game last night and played through it today, and really enjoyed it. I think my favorite puzzles were the sets where the mechanics never changed but the set up became more difficult. I also enjoyed the "slot these items together" puzzles as they served as a break for the more mentally taxing ones, although the object selection was wonky. I'm super glad that the game never resorted to using a timer, as this was probably my biggest worry at the outset.

*There was a bit of frustration in some of the puzzles, but it never came from the puzzle itself, rather the explanation or the real life trappings. The first football one confused me greatly,

I didn't understand that they wanted a continuous pass chain and just connected separate pairs. Then once I realized what they wanted I was even more frustrated since there are two answers and one just doesn't work, three dudes are in a line (ABC) and you can go A-C then C-B but it doesn't accept it.

I stumbled on the brain puzzle,

because of the yellow empty spaces stopping your message.

Also, some of the puzzles are trivial, while others are hard in an abstract way. The broken snowmobile puzzle

was super easy compared to the previous "create a pipe" puzzles, since the outline and backgrounds turn with the pipes unlike in all the previous puzzles of the same type. Since it was the last one, it seems to me that it should've been the hardest of that type.

The bird pictures puzzle is a good example of being abstractly hard.

It's a puzzle that actually would be easy if you could move the pictures around to overlap them, like it's presented to you, but to replicate that using paper is tedious. They should've just let you move the pictures, or found a different way to frame the puzzle. Maybe each image is a perspective from a different window of the lodge for example.

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I agree with most of what has been said. Don't remember having problems with a red/green puzzle though, even though I am red/green colorblind. Maybe they fixed that by now?

The ending fits only if this is a pilot and there will be further episodes, otherwise quite disappointing (even if it's perfect for Grickle).

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I loved it. got it free with Back to the Future and rushed through it last night/today. I really like the explicit separation between the puzzle and the story. The pared down exploration/examination in adventure mode was also welcome to me. It's a somewhat different take on the genre but I thought it really worked. It took me a while (the whole game) to get over my achievement-minded-ness of not getting every puzzle perfect and going back to play again even though it doesn't help your scores was kind of a taunt to me for the ones that I didn't get on first try. Still, with no punishment or reward for getting them all right, in the end I was fulfilled.

I personally loved the ending.

It's kind of a statement on needing to know and to solve the puzzle in front of your face even when pretty much everything and everyone is telling you not to.

Hope that wasn't spoilery. I'll tag it anyway.

great work, Video Games n' Famous!

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It seems that most of us had issues with the ending...

I'm guessing it was supposed to be a cliff-hanger (or possibly just a simple joke -- which wasn't played out very well). If it's the former, they really missed the urgency you need for a cliff-hanger. One way to improve it would have been if we saw Tethers leave his office, hear his car starting, and then see a car blast past a "Scoggins 50 miles" sign in the dead of night. Cut to credits.

Shame the last taste in the mouth was so... unsatisfying. Even on a "ironic comedy" level.

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Eh? It was fine. And I didn't think it was supposed to be a cliff-hanger at all.

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I didn't see it as a cliff-hanger so much as a set-up towards a season of Puzzle Agent games with the gnomes as primary antagonists.

I loved the UI, enjoyed (most of) the puzzles. I really, really didn't like the fact that I was continually told where to go and what order to do things; less linearity and more exploration would be nicer. What's more, perhaps I've just been conditioned by other games to expect that anything shown to me will be important eventually, but the town map made it look like the game would be five times longer than it actually was. I was looking forward to visiting all those places, but never had the chance.

Also, once I finished the game, I loaded the last savegame (in the factory) and noticed in the file that there were a few puzzles I hadn't found. From that location, however, I wasn't able to go back and find them. Perhaps finishing the game should unlock the rest of the puzzles, or the player should be allowed to return to Scoggins in a sandbox to find anything s/he missed.

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Perhaps finishing the game should unlock the rest of the puzzles, or the player should be allowed to return to Scoggins in a sandbox to find anything s/he missed.

I think you can play those puzzles once you're back in his office at the end.

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Eh? It was fine. And I didn't think it was supposed to be a cliff-hanger at all.

At the Telltale PAX panel, Jake (I think) said something along the lines of "How much would it ruin everyone's life to know that we have the entire season of Puzzle Agent storyboarded?" so I believe that it was intended to be a cliffhanger for more story to come. And Jake, yeah it ruined my life a bit. More Puzzle Agent please.

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At the Telltale PAX panel, Jake (I think) said something along the lines of "How much would it ruin everyone's life to know that we have the entire season of Puzzle Agent storyboarded?" so I believe that it was intended to be a cliffhanger for more story to come. And Jake, yeah it ruined my life a bit. More Puzzle Agent please.

The ending of Puzzle Agent always has felt like the ending to more than 50% of all X-Files episodes, so it never bothered me when working on it. The idea that the case is technically solved (the factory opened, which is what you were sent to do), even though by the end of the story that's become the least of your worries, was meant to be frustrating, but I guess at the end of the day, for many, it was way too frustrating. It bugged a lot of people!

The story for the rest of the Scoggins mystery wasn't "storyboarded," per se -- Graham doesn't have pages of shot by shot breakdowns or anything like that -- but Sean had written a two page document which included the bulk of the story from front to back, and the game only really covered the first big chunk of it. I'd like to do more, to see that story through. Hopefully we do!

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Yes! I hope you do too! This was my favorite game of the past year. Annable's work is really interesting and it fits the genre perfectly -- really liked the voice acting too. .

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I hope you guys do end up doing more. I wouldn't even mind if there was less voice acting to cut costs, so long as I don't end up having to click dialogue bubbles consisting of only ellipses...

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Puzzle Agent 2 confirmed for this summer!

I really enjoyed the first iteration, but I hope it will be more challenging this time.

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Clearly, someone was lying to me yesterday on Twitter:

oh man @grickle visiting the studio today. the best of dudes. delicious sandwiches were had.
@seanovanaman @grickle Is this where I speculate about a new Puzzle Agent?
@hermanlilleng graham came by to say he will never draw again. he's going to live in a yurt on the mongolian steppe. we're all super bummed.

I am furious and outraged.

(For a moment, I regretted not publishing speculations, but then I realized that I am not Kotaku, and "two game developers said on twitter that they met" is not news I want to write.)

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