To call Agon a point-and-click game is to grossly overstate the amount of clicking. For a very long time, the game involves nothing more than exhausting dialogue trees of the characters you meet. Althou🌠gh the puzzles you’ll eventually reach are dec⛦ent enough, the swamp of extremely middle-class dialogue you have to trudge through makes it feel more like a book than a game.

Worse still, the dialogue sounds like it’s delivered slowly by the over-keen members of a theater group for simpletons, and you don’t get a whiff of a puzzle until you’ve listened to in excess of an hour of this eye-ওglazing chat. If i🅰t’s designed to make you care for the characters, it’s a terrible mistake - we spent long minutes actively willing them to explode.

Agon makes a vague stab at aping Myst, by confining your exploration to a series of jump points. However, where Myst lets you know wiꦺth intuitive visual🐠 clues where you might be expected to go, Agon leaves you to scour a 360° panorama for something - anything - that changes your cursor.

Sometimes it seems delibeꦺrately mocking. To whittle the branches of a dialogue tree to one option feels like the main achievement in Agon. And for that option to be the tree-exploding question, “Can I ask some more questions?” - well, to continue the arboreal metaphor, that famous scene in Evil Dead springs to mind, because that’s what playing Agon is like: getting fingered by a tree.

Mar 14, 2008