I don't think it was mentioned enough times how awesome it is.
When I finally got an extremely skeptical friend to read the entire story (who didn't even like the premise at first), he called me on the phone and told me he was convinced that Problem Sleuth is some sort of internet masterpiece and one of the funniest things he'd ever read, in any form of media. Seriously, the amount of love and respect I have for Andrew Hussie is unfathomable.
Creative people are often weighed down like Atlas by the mechanics of their art — the painstaking drawing, inking and so on. The relatively crude style of Problem Sleuth meant Andrew got to really *go* places, fast! The energy went into characters, the ideas, the ever-so-delightfully-tangled web of plot.
Which is not to say Andrew Hussie isn't a fine artist: check out Whistles: The Straight Calliope for a different side to his work.
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Weird Puzzle Shit has never been so much fun
Problem Sleuth starts off as a relatively straightforward parody of classic adventure games. However, as the story progresses, the seemingly-mundane layers of reality on the world of the characters is continually stripped away, leaving such a bizarre game universe that the suggestions given can only become more bizarre as well. Eventually, this culminates in a Final Boss battle that utilizes so many Crowning Moments and ludicrous gameplay mechanics that it collapses in on itself like some super-dense-post-modernist singularity of sheer epic.
All these new additions, despite their strange names and over-exaggerations should be familiar to any troper, or any person familiar with classic adventure games or RP Gs in general, as they are all the core foundations of what we expect in those mediums today , but turned Up To Eleven as to even further highlight the fundamental absurdity of a world that runs on these tropes.
The entire thing essentially functions as a positive-feedback-loop of strange hilarity, without ever reaching a point where I found it to be intolerable or stale. Instead, it only made the series that more engrossing, and I found myself checking back every day to see what new direction the plot was going to fling itself in, and cheering for the heroes, no matter how convoluted or weird their actions or challenges became.
In short, Problem Sleuth is all the off-the-rails fun you wanted to have with an adventure game, but weren’t allowed to, until now.