Professor Layton and the Curious Village

So if you’ve been around me and my DS sometime within the last month or so, I’ve probably subjected you to a series of unusual and frustrating puzzles. You may be surprised to know that the source of these puzzles is a video game known as…



Professor Layton and the Curious Village : …and to us existing fans of the game, lets all stop kidding ourselves and acknowledge this game for what it is; a mini-game compilation, not unlike the dozens and dozens of mini-game compilations that pollute the Nintendo DS and the Wii.

Story : So apparently, this Professor Layton chap is some kind of professional puzzle solver. I’d like to know where one gets such a degree, or what kind of money one can make from such a career path (not much, based on certain parts of the game.) They enter the…ehhh….mysterious town of St. Mystere, where they must solve an inheritance mystery, a murder mystery, and many, many, many unrelated mysteries.

On the surface, Professor Layton looks and plays like an old-fashioned point-and-click PC adventure game, but don’t be fooled. Those games, or at least the good ones, had puzzles that the developer at least tried to make sense within the game world. Here, progressing may require you to solve a puzzle about making sheep and wolves cross a river without eating each other. The general layout of the game is that you are not-so-subtly thrown a puzzle by way of talking to a villager or touching random objects in the game world with the stylus. Hence the earlier statement, this is by and large a mini-game compilation.

But that’s part of the unlikely charm of the game. Having some kind of conversation with a villager and then they throw a completely unrelated puzzle in your face, sometimes with questionable reasoning. One villager believes he can’t get laid without first solving a puzzle, meaning that the citizens of St. Mystere equate penis size with logical thinking skills; no doubt some programmer’s wishful thinking. At the same time, I can’t help but find this whole aspect amusing, how casually the town butcher or the perpetually angry man in the village will ask you to solve their puzzle that doesn’t match their personality of situation in any way. It’s like playing Pokemon and finding your character being challenged to an intense, superpower-laden battle by girl scouts, mountain climbers, senior citizens, swimmers in the water, toddlers and members of the game’s international terrorist organization.

The game has a combined total of 135 puzzles, some of which are hidden and have to be found by tapping the stylus all across the screen (or just looking for a FAQ is you feel so inclined.) You won’t need to beat them all, but the game will abruptly stop your progress through the story mode if you haven’t solved a set number of puzzles. I didn’t get frustrated at this like I probably would have at another game, as it simply meant I got to find more puzzles!

There’s a very good chance you’ve seen or heard most of these puzzles before in the past, too, whether it’s in a math textbook or a Flash game on the internet or just your friend trying to pester you. They cover a wide variety of puzzle types, from faux math equations to visual puzzles to rearranging items on the screen using the stylus. The game even admits every now and then that the puzzle you were just playing was famous amongst Egyptians or whatever other historical significance it may have. Within the entire game, there’s maybe four or five “cheap” puzzles that, even after solved, you’ll curse at because the solution doesn’t make sense, but more often than not you’ll find yourself thinking that their solution was rather clever or cute, and that you need to show this to your frustrated coworker who thinks math is the answer to everything.

A small side note, I wish the game concocted a better system for penalizing players than the limited number of hint coins; I often found myself using up hint coins to get a few hints for a certain puzzle, and then rebooting the system to my last save. A small complaint however, one that is not as painful as it would’ve been on a major, disc-based console that takes five minutes to start up.

So while the puzzles themselves may or may not be original, that all of these famous puzzles are found in one package in a way no game before it means that Professor Layton stands out. It’s like the game is a sort of “best of the quickie internet Flash puzzles” compilation, only with more charm and bizarreness. Granted, being a puzzle-based game, replay value is inherently limited once you’ve solved all the puzzles, but you can freely access any of the puzzles you’ve solved to show and embarrass your friends, giving the game unexpected value as either a crowd pleaser or an instrument of torture. So whether you like puzzles, frustrating the people around you, or want some kind of “brain training” game that gets you mental exercise in a more interesting way than Nintendo’s other DS scam, then this game comes highly recommended.

Pros : The art style is a hybrid of Babar and Astro Boy.

Cons : The end game sequence is a bit weak, with all of the game’s storyline “mysteries” being solved not through a shocking reveal but through the Professor genuflecting on them while climbing stairs, and the last puzzle before the ending (the final boss I guess?) is a bit lame.

4 ½ stars.

Mice are famous for their ability to multiply at breakneck speeds. The type of mouse we have here gives birth once a month, birthing 12 babies each time. Baby mice mature and can give birth two months they are born.

You picked up one of these darling baby mice at the pet shop and brought it home the day after it was born. In 10 months from now, how many mice will you have?