The retro sleuthing pleasures of Puzzle Spy International

Like many children of the ’90s, I grew up playing stylized adventure games like Carmen Sandiego. These games combined slow-paced puzzle solving with colorful, stylish art, creating a simultaneously goofy and shadowy backdrop for brainteasing exercises. 

I thought of Carmen Sandiego when I first encountered Puzzle Spy International. Developed primarily by the Oakland-based husband-and-wife duo of Mike and Talia Dashow (and due to be released by November or December of this year), the game threads tricky puzzles in the fizzy frame of a ’60s-styled spy caper, recalling films like James Bond or The Pink Panther. Its sharp and well-defined visual aesthetic is what initially caught my eye, but when I tried out its playable demo, I was struck by its artfully designed puzzles; on a recent weekday night, my partner and I spent half an hour digging into one worldplay-based brainteaser. While the game is still in progress, even at this unfinished stage, it promises to be a fully-developed and thoughtful experience.

When I learned that Mike had been a game development professional for decades, and that Puzzle Spy International marked his first time releasing a game outside of that system, I knew I wanted to learn more. I caught up with Mike and Talia to learn about their inspirations, the communal effort required to build a game, and just how many burritos they’re hoping to buy once it releases later this year.

48 HILLS First, for the uninitiated, can you describe Puzzle Spy International?

MIKE DASHOW It’s a puzzle game that’s very beholden to paper puzzles. So it’s something that fans of Puzzled Pint and New York Times puzzles would really enjoy. 

TALIA DASHOW And it’s also a ’60s spy game with retro art and retro music, and visual novel elements.

MIKE It’s like a spy adventure, but if you took out all the gunfights and the snowmobile chases and replaced them with sudoku. That’s the vibe. 

48 HILLS You kind of answered this a little bit, but I was wondering, what were the inspirations for the game? Were there any specific puzzles or specific films or books or music that you were looking at when you were putting the game together?

MIKE Gameplay-wise, it’s very much based on Puzzled Pint. Up until [Talia] started grad school, we were doing Puzzled Pint devotedly every month. We said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was an actual story, where there was a reason you were doing these aside from just solving the puzzles?”

TALIA We also have a friend who’s a very good puzzler, who has created a bunch of puzzles. We have relied heavily on his puzzle-creating ability to help us make this game.

MIKE Story-wise, we definitely [were inspired by] the whole spy genre, especially James Bond, Get Smart, The Prisoner, things like that. Artistically, it’s very influenced by the midcentury modern style, UPA studios animation, stuff we watched when we were kids in the ’70s that were leftover from the ’50s and ’60s. 

48 HILLS Hearing you talk about the puzzles—and having played the demo—I was wondering, what was it about that style of puzzle that made you want to build the game around it?

MIKE [We] just kind of wanted a bigger reason to do all these puzzles. I mean, we love solving puzzles. But we thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun if there was more than just a loose theme binding these puzzles together?”

TALIA And all the puzzles are a little different. It’s not that we saw [a] particular puzzle and thought, “Oh, let’s build a game around this.” It was, “Which puzzles will fit in the story, and how will the story fit around the puzzles?”

MIKE There’s a lot of variety. Just because you solved puzzle one, does not mean you go into puzzle two [thinking], “Now I know what’s going on!” This one’s a logic puzzle, this one is wordplay, this one is about puns, this one is about moving things around. It’s really fun.

48 HILLS What kind of challenges arise when you’re building these puzzles?

MIKE One is that neither of us are programmers. A lot of the story parts of the game are super easy in the engine—we’re using Ren’Py, which is really designed for people making visual novels—so the visual novel parts, I can do on my own. [But] we have things that are dragging around, it has to make sense whether it’s in the right place and then detect whether you got the score right. We actually have hired a programmer to help us do that, because it’s just not something we have the skills for or have the time to learn. That’s one of the challenges. 

And the other is, there’s a lot of games where the game is about getting good at the game. But if you have no idea what a crossword puzzle clue is and you just don’t know what someone’s referring to, “Get good” doesn’t help you. We have a lot of stuff where we know that sophisticated puzzlers are going to totally get what’s going on. But people who aren’t good at those are going to be like, “What? What am I supposed to do here?” We ended up spending a lot more time than we ever expected for a hint system that really walks people through. They start very vague and go all the way to, “Do you want us to just tell you what the answer is?” We don’t want anyone throwing their computer through the window. 

TALIA Can I answer the question a little bit differently? 

MIKE Please do!

TALIA There’s a certain amount of puzzling that is just like, “OK, I’ve figured out that you have to get, say, one letter from each clue or whatever. And now I just have to go through and find which letter it is.” Finding the letter is not the fun part. You do it because you’ve done the fun part, and now you want to get the answer. It’s actually not easy to create a puzzle that is not just the indexing and the searching, that actually has a fun mechanic in it. 

MIKE We have made some puzzles that were really not fun. Those are not the ones that ended up in the game! I would say half the puzzles in the game we’ve done ourselves, and they’re all good puzzles. But it’s a lot more challenging than it looks from the outside to create a good puzzle.

48 HILLS Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. What is the name of your friend who helped you out with the puzzle design?

MIKE His name is Jay Lorch, he’s a researcher at Microsoft.

48 HILLS And what is the name of the programmer you have helping you out as well?

MIKE His name is SypherZent, he only wants to go by his Discord handle. He’s been great. I’ve worked on a few other games in the past with people who I knew directly, and it’s been this great collaboration up until the time when someone [says], “I’m sorry, [my] day job is too busy, I can’t really work on this anymore.” As a result, when we started this, I [thought], “I don’t want to be beholden on another programmer.” You can’t make a video game without a programmer. But at the same time, I don’t want to get stuck.

TALIA That’s why we came up with this type of project. If this programmer were to become unavailable, we could probably find somebody else to pick up and do the remaining programming. Mike’s been making video games for… 30 years?

MIKE 34.

TALIA But who’s counting? [laughs] But he’s always been part of a big team. We’ve developed some pretty sophisticated ideas that would be great if we had a whole team of developers working on it. Actually, initially, our idea for this game was a lot bigger.

MIKE It was epic, like, it was James Bond times two, spanning the globe—there was a volcano hideout, and bad guys and different sub-bad guys-…

TALIA Space lasers!

MIKE It was going to be about forty puzzles long. And we said, “Oh my god, that’s too big.” We put it aside, started working on something we thought would be smaller. That got too big to do, too. And we said, “What if we go back to our first idea and just chop it [to] one-quarter of the size?” We already got most of the puzzles designed for a quarter of the game. Unfortunately some of the really cool spy stuff ended up not being part of the stuff we kept. But the puzzles are still there and the story should still be fun.

48 HILLS From what I was playing, it’s very charming. I was having a lot of trouble with the puzzles, so at the end of the third demo, I brought my partner in. And then it was so much more fun and interesting, because we got to bounce ideas off of each other. 

TALIA We like doing puzzles together, and recommend that people do this with friends.

MIKE Temescal Brewing had an indie demo event last year. I thought, “Okay, someone will try it, and then someone else will come by and try it.” But one person came by, grabbed some friends, and at a certain point, we had eight people gathered around, working collectively to solve it. In some games, that’s cheating. In our game, that’s cool! When we play video games, we like sitting down and playing them together. What should this character say next? Where should we go next? We’ve recently played Duck Detective, and Frog Detective—if you’ll notice a theme…

TALIA Tangle Tower.

MIKE All deductive games where we play them together. It’s a lot of fun.

48 HILLS I was curious if that collaborative element was in your minds when you were thinking about the game at first, or if that was something that came in as you worked on it more?

TALIA When we go to Puzzled Pint events, we’ve invited friends to come with us, because we each think a little bit differently. Somebody’s going to see it differently than someone else, which might just give us the clue we need to unlock it. It gives us that extra, like, “Oh I never would’ve thought of that, let’s try that!”

MIKE We do daily puzzles—like the New York Times puzzles, but we don’t support the New York Times anymore. But we do them collaboratively. So we had that in mind when we were making this, but we realized we need to communicate to people [that] you should try this collaboratively because it’s fun. And that’s not a mode you’d think of doing video games in.

48 HILLS Especially with this kind of game, like a visual novel or a point-and-click, I tend to think of them as single-player. It was interesting to me that it was a very different experience. On that collaborative note, I was wondering, how does it feel to work on this game together? 

MIKE We love it. And in fact, [it’s] more to let us do something together than to make money. We’re having fun making it together. I have a lot more time to work on it, partially because I’m not in grad school right now, but I also am the one with my arms in the code and stuff like that. And I will do the code without Talia, but I would never think, “I’m gonna go write this character’s dialogue because you’re busy.” No! The whole purpose is to do it as a team.

TALIA I’ve been joking that we’re gonna make tens of dollars on this game. [laughs]

48 HILLS Tens of dollars! That can buy a lot of burritos!

TALIA It could, it could! It might even get to the point where we can…

MIKE … buy two burritos!

TALIA But like you said, it’s not the point. We actually have done similar kinds of exercises the entire time we’ve been together. We used to go to Worldcon together, and spend time brainstorming worldbuilding. We’ve been doing this type of collaborative storytelling, always. I actually am a little surprised that this one is becoming a thing. We have so many ideas that never got past the idea stage. And yet, now we’re seeing it come alive. It’s just so cool.

MIKE To explain the origin of this, I’ve read some of your articles, and I know that you know about all the layoffs in the games scene. I got laid off at the end of 2022. That was my Christmas present, and it was a year and a half before I got another job. Within that year and a half, I said, “I miss doing game dev. I have to do something.” A lot of this just came from that.

48 HILLS I was wondering, hearing you talk about that—and this is a question for both of you too—what do you like about making games? 

MIKE I’ll let you answer that first, because it’s probably a shorter answer. [laughs] Talia’s not as much of a gamer. I mean, it’s a little more part of who I am. 

TALIA Making a game per se wasn’t ever my own personal goal. There was a period when I was younger that I would be like, my book is gonna go on the shelf right there. And I never wrote a book, so it’s more of the storytelling and the worldbuilding that appealed to me. I’ve also been married to this guy for a long time, so games have seeped into my world because we’re a team. This is a way that it could get out into the world with our shared abilities.

MIKE For me, I’ve been in games for, as I said, 34 years. I love games as a medium because of the interaction in them, both telling a story and having you take part in that story, and having a challenging element. In some games, they fight with each other – like, “I wanna see the story but now I have to do this gameplay I don’t want to do, just to get to more story.” But when they’re done really well, they mesh together and combine in a way that you can’t achieve in another medium. As someone who’s worked in the industry for awhile, I’ve been a part of how all those things come together. Games are this fun collaborative process. But there’s also something really fun about, as an artist, being able to [make] all the art choices. Everything that you see visually is me – not mediated in any way.

48 HILLS The only other question I have, because we’ve kind of answered everything else, is what are you hoping to accomplish with this game? If there’s anything in particular.

TALIA Tens of dollars! [laughs] We keep our expectations low. 

MIKE I think just the process of doing it and having people get to play it. It’s a weird game. It’s really looking for this niche audience that really loves brain-teasery, tough [puzzles]. Just before we got on the Zoom call with you, someone who had found me through the local San Francisco IGDA playtested it with his partner. He wrote back and said, “We did two of the three puzzles. We didn’t use any hints, we just sat there and we bounced off each other and we worked on it. And we love it!” That’s who this is for. 

TALIA The reason we’re doing this is because we want to make it. But once we’re doing it, we may as well have somebody playtest it and make sure the puzzles make sense. And then we may as well make a Steam page, right? We might as well try to put it out into the world.

MIKE If you make a puzzle and no one ever gets to play it, what was the point of making the puzzle? Because you know how to solve it. So we hope someone else appreciates it as well.

TALIA I would love to talk a little bit about the music, because it was a total surprise that we got this music.

MIKE We totally lucked out here. Alex Doty, who is an Oakland composer, found me through one of the Discords, and said, “Hey, I would love to do music for you.” Going way back to one of your first questions about the influences, it forced us to sit and listen to music from the period. We were listening to a lot of James Bond music, Henry Mancini, Michael Giacchino’s score for The Incredibles. And we said to Alex, “We want that! We want spy music.” So we have this whole custom score.

TALIA And we did it with barter, because Alex has his own jazz duo, and he needed art for his album.

MIKE I’ve done the art for two of his album covers, and he’s done all this music for us. It really adds a lot of life to the game. We just are constantly thanking our stars. Like, how did we end up with cool bespoke spy music in our game which has a budget of, like, nothing? 

TALIA We just love it so much. We feel like it adds such a great vibe to the game as a whole, we just feel really lucky to have that.

48 HILLS Bartering for it—giving back to each other as part of it—the whole game to me, from having experienced it and hearing you talk about it, collaboration seems to be at the heart of everything that’s happening with it. It’s cool that it’s this game created by this whole community, and everyone is involved with each other, and working with each other. 

MIKE I’m on various Discords for indie game development. And my favorite one is called the BAD Discord, Bay Area Developers. It’s a really tight-knit community. There’s a lot of local venues, whether it’s the MADE or Noisebridge in San Francisco, [where] people hang out too. It’s just neat being a part of a local game dev community.