The Agency: Chapter 1

The Agency: Chapter 1 is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. It's not even the whole e-book, the authors couldn't even write a complete book without having to run off to kickstarter to try get people to pay them to write the rest of the book.

I wish there was a kickstarter to pay them not to write any more crap e-books to pollute Steam with. Steam is for games. Not books.

This crap e-book swaps the traditional high school anime fan club dropout fantasy/slice of life fanfiction for a high school anime fan club dropout "steampunk" fanfiction. For those who don't know (so lucky), Steampunk is just goths who discovered the colour brown.

Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage.

Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book.

One of the chief problems with failed authors polluting Steam with non-game E-books is that E-books can easily just be presented in a web browser... there's no justification for charging money on Steam for what might as well be a webpage. We don't spend thousands on buying a gaming rig to spend money on Steam for something Chrome or Firefox could do.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The E-Book only displays in 4:3 pillarboxed aspect ratio. It's possible they developed this using an old CRT they found in a dumpster, or this E-Book has been specifically designed for people trying to read books on PC's from 1995... either way, this isn't really acceptable in the modern era of PC gaming.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

You don't have to take my word about how bad the E-Book is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. The Agency: Chapter 1 has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the E-Book absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for starting to read the E-book, trivial to achieve, but less than 9 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the E-Book. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this E-Book was with readers reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in reader counts for the E-Book. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 9 percent of readers bothered playing the E-Book for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this E-Book to have so many concurrent readers who didn't bother engaging with this E-Book? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.

That tells us people only really bought this E-Book for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the E-Book just has a couple of readers every week running up the E-Book and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many E-Books like this, with little merit as a serious game or book, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

The Agency: Chapter 1 is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the E-Book, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. You can get better quality books and comics for free online or from public libraries, or from bookstores for a fraction of the price of this "game". Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games.

I am 32 years old.

My ex-wife and I have a daughter together, and we adopted our son together. Both are now 4 years old.

When we were going through our separation, I felt lost and unhappy. I was self-destructive. One day, I was so angry with everything spiraling out of control that I punched a concrete wall in a moment of overwhelming emotion. This resulted in breaking my fifth metacarpal in my right hand—the hand I worked with, played games with, and used to carry my children to bed—the hand I desperately needed to ensure I could continue providing.

Upon learning the severity of the self-inflicted damage, I became almost suicidal. Keep in mind that just a few months before this, I was the happiest man, with no history of depression or anxiety. I had never experienced anger outbursts, nor was I the type to break down and cry, but I was in a tough situation that truly prevented me from seeing the light on the other side.

With nothing better to do, I looked for a game I could play WITH ONE HAND while recovering. Somehow, I stumbled upon this game and read some of the comments. I decided it was worth a try... I must admit I didn't beat the game, nor did I play as much as some of you. In fact, I may have played this game for only a day or two. That being said, after doing so, I had a new joy and hope for life. I managed to leave behind the pain and suffering that had been thrust upon me. I could experience the joy and happiness of other people. I relaxed for 5 ♥♥♥♥ minutes listening to this music, long enough to realize that I would be okay.

After realizing this, I turned off the game and went back to work. My hand hurt a lot, but I was motivated. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and became the father I needed to be at that moment, not the weak boy I was behaving like.

Today, I am close friends with the mother of my children. We don't fight, argue, or say hurtful things to each other. We are parents and friends.

Now I have 3 children. My third child is, wait, ALSO 4 YEARS OLD. The woman I am with was going through a very similar situation at the time of my separation, and we just unexpectedly stumbled into each other's lives. We have been dating for a year and are very happy together.

Moral of the story: you never know what life has in store for you, and if I had given up when all odds were against me, I wouldn't be where I am today. This silly little game helped me realize that.

Thank you.

We’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty

I wish there was a middle button. Chapter 1 wasn't anything special and I can't be sure if it was so bad it was hilarious or if the humour was actually right up my alley.

Full review here.

Voice acting, cool little mini puzzles, interesting story. Very cool game.

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.

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.

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.

A Game Without Heart or Soul

Pros:

Cons:

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.

This game did not capture me at all. The dialogue got a bit too drawn out at times and I didn't realize when I bought the game that it would only be the scrambled picture puzzles. I will not be buying future chapters of this series.

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.

Unnervingly short, but well worth the price. The puzzles are satisfying, and I feel like I have only touched the surface of a rich world.

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.

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.

>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


will update with an actual review later

Okay! Time for a brief rundown:

A great first bit to what will hopefully be a fun adventure. The storyline really got me interested and I am eager to see more. Very entertaining!

“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.