Teenagent: the secret service that ran out of patience and turned to a fortune teller

The writing wins almost everyone over; the puzzle design charges a toll not everyone is willing to pay.

A clueless agency turns to a fortune teller

On an ordinary summer day, two men in dark glasses and trench coats grab a teenager off the street. Behind the kidnapping is the RGB, a secret service that spent six months trying to work out who stole the gold from Europe's leading bank and got nowhere — and that, out of leads, ended up in a fortune teller's parlor. She gave the advice the agency followed to the letter: turn the boy, Mark Hopper, into an agent.

It's a point-and-click adventure with the air of a crime mystery, developed and published by Metropolis Software itself, which reached stores on March 31, 2009.

The reward promised to the hero, the store's official synopsis says, is girls — because, according to that same synopsis, every girl loves a secret agent. That's the tone Teenagent strikes from its very first line: cheap espionage and teenage jokes.

The writing wins over even those who need a walkthrough open beside them

Repeated from review to review, from launch to years later: the writing is what keeps the player going. Whoever wrote on April 12, 2009, even admitting they had to reach for a walkthrough several times to avoid getting stuck, swears the story is hilarious and that the dialogue rewards anyone with patience, puns included. Someone who only came to the game on April 20, 2011, echoes the praise, calling it light and full of tough puzzles.

Some picked this as their first game to test out GOG, on June 7, 2009, and hope the store will bring over the Sierra classics too. Another review from the same year sums it all up in a single line: a short game, full of jokes, good all the same — and for that very reason they wanted more games like it.

Not every bit of praise comes without a caveat. Whoever opened the page on April 2, 2009, expecting the version that marked their childhood in Polish, with full voice and soundtrack, found instead a far leaner download, in English only. They rated it well even so — but made a point of noting what was missing.

When the puzzle logic becomes the enemy

Whoever played launch week, on April 11, 2009, sums up the problem with a single puzzle: to get a dart, you have to combine a needle, a pine cone and a feather — and the pine cone only turns up if you first swap a plastic apple with a hedgehog. The dart, in turn, is for hitting a beehive. None of these steps follows any clue the game has given before: it's try everything with everything, or nothing.

Months later, on October 27 of that year, another review took the comparison further: alongside classics like Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the Road, which dropped clues and made every action carry a purpose, here the path is testing combination after combination until one works. Someone who came back to the game on April 22, 2012, hammered the same point, dubbing the problem logic from another planet.

Even so, someone who ended up abandoning the game halfway through, on March 23, 2010, admits the only thing worth the time there was the sense of humor — the rest, according to that review, was pure stubbornness.

For those with patience to spare for the puzzle, but not for its logic

Approval dominates the reviews, but it's far from unanimous, and the split is no accident: those who praise the writing and those who loathe the puzzles may be describing the same game from opposite angles. Teenagent is for anyone who grew up pointing and clicking at everything on screen and doesn't mind keeping a walkthrough open beside them — it's what nearly every bit of praise, from 2009 to 2011, has in common.

Whoever finished the game in a single afternoon, as a review from June 20, 2009, noted, comes away happy with the length: it's short, and it ends before it wears out the patience of anyone who'll take on the crooked logic of its puzzles. Whoever expects each step to explain itself, as the classics cited in the October 2009 review demand, will be left banging their head — and gives up partway, like the player who, in 2010, dropped the game halfway.

The writing holds the player's hand; the puzzles are what decide whether that hand stays to the end.