MySims Agents is a delightful video game. The presentation is charming; the puzzle solving is lightweight enough to never be frustrating while being engaging enough to keep me happily playing through it; several of the NPCs are amusingly quirky; one of the minigames is surprisingly tricky; the mixture of your main character’s journey plus the extra stories you hear through the phone messages works rather better than I expected; and it’s long enough to feel satisfying without even beginning to overstay its welcome. Liesl and I both happily played through all of it; Miranda’s played through a little more than half, which is quite good considering that she never finishes (or even gets particularly close to finishing) games with plots and linear storylines.

Despite all of that, very few people seem to have played the game: I heard about it through Michael Abbott, but the game’s only other appearance in my feed reader was in a (rather interesting) review by Christopher Williams. I would like to construct some sort of narrative out of this about how juvenile art doesn’t get its due, were it not for the uncomfortable fact that I actually don’t have much to say about the game myself. At first I thought that might be because it’s very good but no BioShock, and not quite a Mass Effect 2, either, but looking through the list of games I’ve recently played, that’s not the only issue going on here: I see games like Yakuza 2 on that list that are much worse than MySims Agents but that gave me something active to whine about.

That’s been happening to me a fair amount recently: the same thing happened with Plants vs. Zombies, for example. (Which is the only game that I can think of that I thought I was done with playing and then picked up again half a week after blogging about it; and my iPad purchase has spawned a third round of playing it!) Plants vs. Zombies was another game that didn’t spawn a lot of discussion on the blogosphere, but at least people seemed to be playing it: I’d see various throwaway comments about it on blogs, or offhand mentions in my Twitter feed.

Whereas I get the feeling that Michael is the only other person I know who has played this game at all. Which is a shame. Give it a try: it’s charming, it’s fun, and it knows when you’ve had your fill.

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