Teenagent

After a secret service agency fails to close a case dealing with a major bank's gold mysteriously disappearing before people's eyes, they bring in a fortune teller to choose an unlikely hero at random. She chooses Mark Hopper, a teenager who agrees to help on the promise that being an agent will make him more attractive to the ladies.

It sets up the game to be a humorous point-and-click adventure much like Monkey Island, but isn't as funny, and it strongly relies on puzzles that don't make too much sense.

The interface is fairly easy to use; left click to examine, right click to use. Your inventory can be accessed by hovering towards the top of the screen, and pressing F1 brings up a menu for file options, and changing the speed of the text, game, and main character.

The game is essentially split into three parts. Firstly, you need to train as an agent, secondly you need to find a way into the suspect's mansion, and thirdly, you need to find evidence to send the suspect down.

The entire game suffers for not providing enough hints on your objective, or how items should be used. When you start off, you need to escape from jail, but after grabbing some items, it isn't obvious how you progress. You have to repeatedly attempt to interact with the window so Mark shouts the guard to bring some food. After finally escaping, your next task is to interrogate an agent to gain a password. There is no hints that he has a weakness to an army magazine, and there are no hints that the guard will part with said magazine if you give him a kaleidoscope. Later on, there is no real need to get an acorn from a hedgehog, and there is no reason to give him a plastic apple. To get the apple you need to swap it with a nut, even though there is no need to do so either. To get the nut is a bit of a long winded process too. Once you finally have the acorn in your possession, you combine a few items together to form a dart to throw at a bees nest. Why can't you just throw the rock at the nest and skip the entire process?

Teen Agent had a good premise but struggled to flesh out the story and was severely let down by the puzzles. It's split into three sections so you know your overall task, but the sequence of steps to get there is just ridiculous. The second part of the game makes the bulk of the content and suffers from the lack of direction, so you pick up random items and struggle to piece together the logic or the sequence of steps to achieve your goal.