Fargo is genuinely more puzzling than this.

In Professor Layton and the Curious Village, I was disappointed that the puzzles were so far divorced from the narrative, and that they tended to be of the "placemat puzzle" variety. Puzzle Agent's puzzles are designed to more closely integrate with the game's story, but... they have other issues.

Can you help Agent Nelson Tethers decrypt this encoded number?

Of the - admittedly, few - puzzles I've done so far, most have been criminally stupid, like this. The remainder take the form of logic puzzles, and are more difficult only because they rely on a number of unstated assumptions -- like that a tournament is single-elimination format, or that a "midnight to midnight" security service means there's no replacement security after midnight.

The story itself hasn't done much of anything to keep me interested, either: it's clearly inspired by Fargo, resting heavily on the theme of an isolated, snowed-in Minnesota town and its terse, hermitish inhabitants. But the action moves excruciatingly slowly, and foreshadows its leads with the subtlety of a dump truck.

Oh, and just to continue kicking Puzzle Agent while it's down: the production values are dirt-poor. Animations are missing frames, and zoomed-in art shows lots of artifacting. The whole thing plays out like a cartoon-pitch storyboard. Although the voice acting is pretty good, which is a bit weird, everything else considered.

Progress: Solved 7 puzzles.