Despite my best efforts, this review uses the word “puzzle” entirely too often.My apologies.
I first decided that I wanted Professor Layton and the Curious Village for DS when I saw a splash ad on 1up.I’m not sure what it was about this ad that told me this was a game that I would like, or even what about the ad led me to believe it was a puzzle game, but I was immediately won over by the art style (or possibly some subliminal marketing gimmick).After some research confirmed my suspicions, I picked up the game a week later.
Layton is a puzzle game.No bones about it.If you don’t like puzzle games, you won’t like this one.I like them, however, and Layton adds a little something extra.The puzzles are stylishly couched in an adventure story that makes the transition from one to the next a little smoother.Professor Layton and his apprentice Luke arrive in Saint Mystere, ostensibly to solve an estate dispute.It’s never made clear exactly whatLayton is a Professor of, but the dude really loves puzzles.For real.Everything he looks at reminds him of a puzzle, which he then has his apprentice solve.The apprentice is also, coincidentally, a big puzzle fan.Oh, and did I mention that every single inhabitant of Saint Mystere loves puzzles as well? I mean LOVES puzzles.Though, for people who are obsessed with puzzling, they don’t seem very smart, since everyone you meet wants you to solve their puzzles for them.As you travel through the town, more and more mysteries are added to your list.You try to solve them by talking to the local folk, but before anyone will tell you anything, you have to solve a puzzle for them.There are various excuses given for this.They can’t concentrate on what you’re saying because this puzzle is bothering them.They can’t decide if you’re worthy of their information until you solve a puzzle for them.Sometimes there’s no excuse at all.What’s that? There’s been a murder? Solve this puzzle.
Every puzzle (there’s about 130 of them) has a difficulty rating.The unit used to measure their complexity is called a picarat.You earn the picarats by solving the puzzle, and the game keeps track of your total.A quick google image search reveals that a picarat is actually this:
So…enjoy those.
Puzzles start at 10, and go all the way up to 99 picarats.The first few that you do are in the 10-15 picarat range, and are childishly easy.I was originally kind of disappointed, because I thought the game wouldn’t be challenging enough.I was completely wrong, and there were quite a few times this game made me feel like a total idiot.When you get stuck, you can spend a “hint coin” on a clue.You can spend up to 3 per puzzle, with the first clue being very vague, and often not helpful, while the third clue pretty much gives you the answer.You find these hint coins hidden around the village by tapping the screen.This was the low point of the game for me.Sometimes hint coins are hidden in places that seem logical to tap: Hey, that jar might have a coin in it.Sometimes not: Hey, that random spot of road looks like it might be hiding a coin.This led to furious pixel tapping on every screen that was kind of time consuming and not really very fun.Technically I didn’t have to do this, as I had an abundance of hint coins that I was very miserly with, refusing to spend one even after staring at a puzzle for half an hour.It just bothered me that there might be coins around that I wasn’t getting.
A lot of the puzzles in Layton, I had seen before.There were classics like the, “I need this many ounces of water, and I only have these three measuring cups of different sizes”, as well as a favourite of mine, the “these guys have to cross this river, but if you leave this guy alone with that guy, they’ll all die, or something”.Also on the table was a new (at least to me) breed of puzzle using matchsticks, that I actually ended up being really good at.
Chris and I played this game together (no mean feat for a DS game), which really highlighted for me the differences in how people’s brains work.There were puzzles that I could stare at forever and not get, then Chris would glance over and have the answer immediately.This also worked the other way around.It got to the point where a certain type of puzzle would come up, and the DS would immediately be handed to the person with an aptitude for it.I was especially good at matchstick puzzles, while Chris had to do anything that involved spatial awareness.What would that odd shape look like folded up and rotated? I have no god-damned idea.Very few puzzles involved math of any sort, and none of the ones that did were too complicated.If you find yourself doing long division, you’ve missed some tricky wording somewhere.
We finished every puzzle in the game, although the very last one took us almost two days.The DS was passed back and forth pretty often, and I even took it to work.We ended up doing in 567 moves something that supposedly can be done in 81.Supposedly.I’m pretty skeptical.
Even though we’re finished, we still break it out every Sunday to download the weekly puzzle, and I can’t wait for the sequel.My only concern is that it seems they’ve used up a lot of the standard, traditional logic puzzles, so I hope they can find new spins to put on them, or come up with something entirely new.And puzzling.Puzzle.Puzzles.Puzzled.The word puzzle has now lost all meaning.
