Professor
Layton and the Curious
Village is a very
difficult game to pin down in any way.
It’s hard to categorize. It’s
hard to describe. Most of all, it’s hard
to really understand just why this game is so much fun. A puzzle and adventure tag-team equal in
greatness to duos like peanut butter and chocolate or chips and salsa, Professor
Layton is a truly wonderful intellectual duet of fun.
Just what
is Professor Layton and the Curious
Village? Developed by RPG uber-studio Level 5, Layton is a mediocre
adventure game combined with brain-twisters, some of which are hundreds of
years old. While this most likely sounds
like a recipe for monotony, rest assured such is not the case. Though both aspects of Layton
would be undesirable individually, together you get a mesh of gameplay that
will grip you and leave you opening up your DS during red lights and other
short pauses, hoping to complete another of Layton’s challenging puzzles.
Hit the jump for more brain-bending fun.
The game
focuses on the titular Professor Layton and his apprentice, Luke. The two are called to quaint, enigmatic
little town in the English countryside called St. Mystere. The town is dominated by a mysterious tower,
though it holds far more secrets than just the meaning of the sky-high
monstrosity. Summoned by the widow of
the late Baron Reinhold, the owner of the village, the pair must solve many
mysteries on their quest to find the “Golden Apple” that is hidden somewhere in
the village. The finder of the Golden
Apple will get the dead Baron’s entire inheritance.
This yarn
is a convenient setup for the many puzzles Layton presents you. Everybody, from the butler to the inn owner
to some random guy in the town restraint is a puzzle nut, and sometimes it
seems that just looking at them is all it takes for them to stop you and ask
you a puzzle. In fact, a town resident
informs you at the beginning of the game that St. Mystere’s main export is
puzzles. The game contains over 130
puzzles, after all, so the story’s puzzle fixation is a forgivable premise in
order to cram in so much brain-teasing goodness.
The
gameplay of Professor Layton takes two forms.
Some of your time is spent in the overworld, exploring St. Mystere,
talking to villagers, and the like. The
actual area you can explore and the number of people who can talk to is more
limited than other games with adventure aspects. Taken on its own, this part of the game seems
a little subpar, until you realize that the main part of the game is actually
the puzzles.
The majority
of your time will be spent in puzzle mode, solving actual puzzles. These puzzles take myriad forms, requiring
many different kinds of input to solve.
In one puzzle you will be writing your answer out, the next will have
you circling something, the one after that will require you to draw some lines,
and the one of that will have you moving blocks to get a ball from one space to
another. The many different forms of
puzzles and inputs make this game ideal for the DS. Sure, most could be done on another system,
but the interface would be a chore and frankly wouldn’t be fun.
The puzzles
themselves present a good range of challenge, from easy to infuriatingly
hard. However, you don’t have to
complete every puzzle you come across.
In fact, should you encounter one you can’t handle you can just leave it
and move on before you tear all your hair out.
I found myself only getting stuck on one or two puzzles, though I did
spend over an hour on some of the really tricky puzzles at the end. Sometimes you will get items when you solve
puzzles. These items are parts of
several sets, and if you complete a set you get an extra ability, as well as
unlocking some extra puzzles.
Layton’s fixation on
puzzles does sometimes seem a bit forced.
At one point there is a murder, and a villager says something like “Dear
god, he’s dead! Hey, that reminds me of
a puzzle.” However, everything is
cleared up by the end of the game, and such things are explained in a way that
events like the above example will no longer bother you.
Level 5 is
well known for their graphical prowess, and it shows. In an inspired decision, Level 5 decided to
forgo their traditional anime fare and instead designed the whole of Layton with a fantastic
rendition of European animation. Other
reviewers have described the animation as reminiscent of the movie The Triplets of Belleville, and they are
correct. This similarity is most
apparent in Layton’s
beautifully produced cutscenes. These
videos also feature nice voice-acting to compliment the exquisite images. They are so good they will actually leave you
wishing there were more of them in the game.
If Level 5 were to make a Professor Layton movie, I would not hesitate
to buy it.
The
soundtrack is a very rustic experience.
All the tracks heavily feature an instrument that sounds like an
accordion, which really jells with the whole vibe the rest of the game
emanates. I personally found that the
soundtrack was rather charming and added to the experience the game
provides. However, it has been my experience
that some people tolerate accordion far more than others. Listen at your own risk.
The best
feature of Professor Layton is the longevity.
The main game will take a good amount of time (it took me around 10
hours), but once that’s done, there’s still more to come! Every week, you can connect to Nintendo’s
servers and download a new puzzle. The
Japanese version of this game came out a year before the localized version, and
Level 5 has supported the game with a new puzzle every week so far. Even if they stop now, that’s another 50+
puzzles heading our way.
When you
talk about Professor Layton and the Curious
Village, you really can’t
talk about the game’s part individually.
While some parts are weaker than others, the different parts work together
as a team to minimize each other’s weaknesses.
Each part coalesces with the others to provide a unique experience that
can’t be found anywhere else.
Final Score: B
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