Wednesday Puzzle Game: Agon: The Mysterious Codex

Andrea, Given, and I finished Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon last week. Our impressions? Okay game, too many box puzzles, funny main characters, and the corniest ending to a game we've seen... but what should I expect from a game where the ancient Egyptians had holographic technology?

With that done, we were going to play The Fool's Errand but I could not get the Amiga emulator to work. So we settled on Agon: The Mysterious Codex.

The graphics are impressive, although Andrea though the reflected image of the professor was creepy. We got off to a slow start in the game (having overlooked a piece of paper in a wastebasket), but we solved a few puzzles and then got to the "key" puzzle.

I like to think of this type of puzzle as "organic". That is, a puzzle that arises naturally out of the environment, as opposed to being placed there. In the case of this one, we needed a key but they had all fallen from their posts. So with six keys and eight posts, we needed to place them correctly in order to select the one we needed. And it wasn't by knowing that the guard organized them by prime numbers or that there was a hidden color coding scheme that allowed us to figure it out, but by applying an almost Holmesian logic we got our key.

Organic puzzles are rare and hard to come up with, especially in a hunt situation. I have an idea for one should The Smoking GNU ever have the guts to host a Game, but by that time it'll probably be replaced with something more elegant.