At its core, Layton is a point-and-click adventure. At all times you’re presented with a scene, and tapping on specific things with the stylus will let you talk to characters, find hint coins (more on this later), or move to different scenes. Talking to characters or tapping on certain pieces of landscape (like, oddly enough, a flower patch) usually results in a round of puzzle-solving (and Penny Arcade is right—nobody will tell you anything or help you in any way without first presenting you with a head-scratcher. This is the game’s most inventive, yet frustrating, aspect).
Puzzles are usually very straightforward. Some examples: there are three pitchers. One is eight gallons, one is five, and the last one is three. The eight-gallon pitcher is full of liquid. How can you make the eight and five-gallon pitchers have exactly four gallons each? Or: on one side of the river, there are three chicks and three wolves. If at any time the wolves outnumber the chicks, the wolves will eat the chicks. Can you get all six animals to the other side of the river? And finally: one germ is sitting in a jar. The germs split every minute, so after one minute there are two germs, and after two minutes there are four. After sixty minutes, the jar is full of germs. How long will it take to fill the jar if you start with two germs? As you can tell, there’s a lot of logic and deduction involved in solving these problems. Fortunately the puzzles do not have time limits, so you can take as long as you want and even make notes on the touch screen with the stylus.
Puzzles are “ranked” for difficulty based on how many “picarats” they are worth. Each time you present a wrong answer, the number of picarats decreases (although the puzzle’s difficulty does not). You can use hint coins (found throughout the landscapes by tapping things) to unlock hints. You can get up to three hints per puzzle, but obviously you are limited to the number of hint coins that you have in your possession. Unfortunately, the game does not auto-save when you fail a puzzle. That is, if you get an answer wrong, you can simply restart the game and try again without penalty. While this does alleviate some frustration, it also undercuts the game’s intention.
Puzzle solving, ironically, nets you more puzzles. As you play you’ll accrue pieces of a mechanical dog, furniture, and scraps of a portrait. The mechanical dog is fairly straightforward, but the furniture and portrait pieces eventually become variations on slide puzzles. You can also download a new puzzle once a week if you have access to Wi-Fi. Solved puzzles are saved in a log, and you can challenge yourself or friends to solve them all over again if you so desire.
The game looks great. Drawn in a European art style vaguely reminiscent of The Triplets of Belleville, Professor Layton is brimming with color and life. Although the backgrounds and character sprites are static images, basic mouth and arm movements and the occasional fully-animated cutscene really make Layton’s world pop off the screen. The cutscenes also employ well-spoken vocal dialogue, and the entire game is backlit with a mysterious musical score which fits St. Mystere’s unusual personality very well.
Overall, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a very interesting game but it definitely caters to a niche audience. If you don’t like brain-teasers, it’s probably not for you. Despite its charming atmosphere and interesting plot, your patience for puzzles will ultimately decide how much you like this game, so consider yourself warned.
Pros:
Lastability: 8.0
Well, if you like puzzles, there are enough here to keep you busy for months. If you don’t like puzzles that much, you thankfully don’t have to solve them all to beat the game. But once you do that, there’s very little reason to go back if you don’t want to solve the rest.
Final: 8.0
Professor Layton and the Curious Village will admittedly find its market with a niche audience, but it caters to this niche audience extremely well. Its production values are high, the puzzles are truly puzzling (some even familiar), and the plot is constantly thickening. Now then, there are ten candles in a room. Somebody opens a window, and three of the candles go out…
Well, this review is a little late. ;)
>"No mechanism to keep players from restarting if they fail a puzzle."
I'm not sure how this is a "con", really... Since the game is single player, it doesn't really hurt the game if the player wants to "cheat".
Anywhoo, I *loved* this game and cannot wait for the next one. If you haven't bought this one yet, please do.
He's like wacko jacko in an elementary school: he has no business being there.
Plus, my suspension of disbelief might be on the fritz but WHY are nearly all of the residents of St. Mystere so obsessed with puzzles. It would have been fine if one of two people are puzzle fanatics, but all of them?
