The Nintendo DS is a haven for variety and quirkiness. Many games found on this handheld console just would not work on other consoles – no arguments. One such game is Level 5’s Professor Layton and the Curious Village, the first of three puzzle oriented games under the Professor Layton name. Professor Layton utilizes the point and click adventure system, but instead of trying to find obscure ornaments to solve illogical puzzles, you are roaming through the village of St. Mystere seeking out puzzles, clues and mysteries - I think of it as an interactive book of puzzles. The question is: ‘How does an “interactive book of puzzles” translate into game?’ and most importantly, ‘Is it a good game?’. I thought it was a great game.

As soon as the game boots up, I was welcomed by the charming title screen melody. Its inviting notes were easy to listen to and set the tone of mystery well; you knew exactly what this game is all about by just listening to it. In fact, the audio work as a whole is well tuned to the theme of puzzle solving. Impressive. Even more impressive are the fully animated shorts topped with a couple of British accents — I love them and they do more than get the job done. The rest of Professor Layton comprises of simple, but effective European styled drawings that remind me of Tin Tin. In addition to the cleanly drawn characters, subtle animations and transitions give emphasis to the dialog being exchanged between the characters.

Using the stylus, you guide both Professor Layton and, his easy to anger sidekick, Luke on their quest to locate the Golden Apple in the little village of St. Mystere. The stylus does everything from moving, talking with NPCs, to uncovering hidden items; there are no mandatory button presses at all. Way to use the hardware, Level 5.

Professor Layton prides itself with logic based puzzles and I would agree — for approximately 95% of the given puzzles. The remaining 5% of puzzles are either too obscure or require meticulous decoding to work out. Careful reading and attention to detail usually gets the job done when tackling the majority of the puzzles, but there are puzzles where trial and error is the only option. Each puzzle’s difficulty is given a “Picarat” value; the higher the value, the more “difficult” it is supposed to be. I found the value to be extremely arbitrary since there were puzzles with Picarat values in the low 30s or 20s which stumped me while some of the 50s were solved with relative ease. When stumped, I could always rely on the three available hints to bail me out. They cost one “hint coin” (found throughout St. Mystere) each and, for the most part, prove to be extremely helpful – especially the last hint.

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Tags: nintendo, professor layton

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 8:33 pm and is filed under NDS Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.