Tuesday 12 Jan 2010

Professor Layton is a man who loves to solve puzzles. In fact, it’s what he lives for. Not useful real-life puzzles like “who kidnapped my cat?” or “where is my missing shoe?” but rather abstract mathematics and logic puzzles like “how many triangles are in this picture?” It strikes me as a skill that’s singularly useless in the world other than if you want to qualify as a puzzle-nerd, but somehow in the world of Professor Layton and the Curious Village this is considered the most quintessential skill anyone could have, and Layton is the highly respected master of puzzle-solving, and thus a most respected individual. Think Sherlock Holmes, but instead of solving murders and mysteries he solves matchstick puzzles.

The Curious Village, subtly named St Mystere

Layton has an apprentice, someone who aspires to be a master puzzle-solver like him. And so you help them both solve the puzzles thrown at them by all and sundry and so solve the riddle of the curious village. It is a very curious village – everyone in the village is obsessed with puzzles and positively delights in offering up some new conundrum for Layton and his apprentice to solve at every opportunity. The story begins with Layton’s arrival in a village called St Mystere – he has been called here to try and find the Golden Apple, a treasure said to be of great worth. Pretty soon it’s clear that this village is even more curious than expected given the title of the game. As you direct Layton between places in the village the mystery surrounding the Golden Apple is slowly uncovered, not by the puzzles you solve, but by scripted conversations and events, and through some beautifully animated cut scenes.

My flippant tone might lead you to believe I think the premise and story unnecessary, but you would be mistaken. Level 5 could have taken these puzzles and wrapped them in a little menu structure that allowed you to choose a type of puzzle, and maybe unlocked new ones as you went, but that would have been far more boring and far less memorable than the format they have packaged the puzzles in. Although the puzzles are almost never related to the story, characters or locations, those elements make a huge difference to the motivation for completing puzzles – the reward for completing more puzzles is to explore the town more and the reward for exploring the town is to find more puzzles, so they feed off each other to make each part (puzzles and adventuring) more satisfying than they would have been on their own.

Logic puzzles and brain teasers – fun, fun, fun!

It’s hard to explain just what the puzzles are. If you’re the sort of person who has done puzzle books – logic puzzles in particular – then you’ve done all of these before. In fact, there were very few out of the 120 or so puzzles that I hadn’t seen before, having been a bit of a puzzle-nerd myself in my day. That’s not to say they aren’t interesting or sometimes still tough, just that the puzzles are not wholly original and if you’re the nerdy puzzle-doer sort you might find Layton a little been-there-done-that.

If you haven’t done logic puzzles before then you’re in for a treat (to my mind anyway), and a much longer experience than me. Some require you to think laterally, some require a bit of deduction, some a bit of maths, some are trick questions so they test your comprehension of what’s being asked, and some just require fiddling to get the right answer, like the slide puzzles. Certain of the puzzles are phrased in a way that makes it a little difficult to understand just what’s being asked for, but fortunately you can use hint coins to receive up to three hints for each puzzle, which help enormously, with the last hint almost giving you the answer. The hint coins are found by scouring each location in the village with your stylus – so they’re a little bit of effort to collect, but there are plenty of them which means you should always have a few spare.

Level 5 : Studio Ghibli as 90 : 100. That is, they are almost as good.

The production values of Professor Layton and the Curious Village are top notch. The puzzles are really varied, and each type has an interface that suits it naturally; you use the stylus for all the puzzles – no other buttons are necessary. The graphics are charming – think European cel-shaded animation style. All the locations and characters are hand drawn and the cut scenes (of which there are quite a few) are animated in full colour and detail, and with full voice acting (which is also very high quality.) The whole town has a wonderfully whimsical atmosphere to it, and soon enough you uncover just why everyone behaves in such a strange manner. The writing and the music is also uniformly excellent – Level 5 cannot be faulted for the packaging of these interesting puzzles. There are even puzzles you can unlock by completing various meta-games, so there really is a solid amount of content in the game.

Even with all the quality packaging, Professor Layton and the Curious Village can only be as fun as the puzzles themselves because the majority of the time is spent solving them. I personally love these kinds of puzzles and thoroughly enjoyed doing them. This way of doing logic puzzles is definitely more engaging than the standard book format which usually doesn’t have hints, and which certainly doesn’t have a story or a way of stopping yourself from looking at the answer before you solve the riddle. I’m sure those that haven’t seen most of these puzzles before will enjoy them even more than I did, so I can recommend this first Layton game very highly. Nintendo have also published a second game in the series – Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, and have recently published a fourth in the series in Japan (with a fifth on the way). I hope the second one comes out soon in South Africa too because I’m interested to see just what Layton and his apprentice are up to next. And I’m keen to try some more puzzles.

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Contributor:	Peter

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