In the vast gaming pantheon, I like to think there are three types of games: The ones everyone knows about, you know, the ones that started out in the mid-70-80's, and are huge franchises today, and everyone should know. There are the new titles that are blasted in your face so that you have to know about them, are covered in great detail, and by the time you play them, they already seem like an established franchise. Then there are those games that not many people care about. You hear about them, yes, but because they're not blown in your face through multimillion dollar adverts, you often don't give them a second thought. Professor Layton and the Curious Village is definitely one of the latter.
Professor Layton, is, for all intents an purposes, one of those books you sometimes find at a Grocery store, filled with puzzles that you'd often show to your friends, solve the easiest ones you could find, and go to the back of the book for the answers to the ones you were too lazy to figure out on your own (or the ones you'd stare at for hours without making an sense of them), in a DS cartridge that you can carry around at your leisure. It's a collection of logic puzzles that range from simply getting a ball from one end of a block-filled maze to the other, to a riddle with a deceptively simple answer. Where it shines above said books, however, falls into two categories; its presentation and the story that connects all of the puzzles together.
The story goes something like this: You are Professor Layton, a skinny man in a top hat renowned for puzzle solving skills, and his apprentice, Luke. You are given a letter from a someone named Lady Dahlia (like the murder, yes.) To come help her find the Golden Apple in the village of St. Mystere, the finder of which will inherit a dead baron's fortune. Once there, you begin a Sam & Max like adventure, where you find clues, get to different places, and progress the story along the way. This is augmented by the fact that in order to get almost any information to help guide you along your way, you must first solve one of 120 puzzles (not all of them are mandatory, but for the completist there's a lot of work to do here). It seems like a shaky dynamic at first (why would all these people be so fascinated with puzzles?), but as the story works itself out, it does happen to make sense along the way (trust me).
The story is presented to you mostly in the form of dialogue between characters, with speech bubbles all present and accounted for. However, during rare instances, you are given gorgeously well made FMV cutscenes, with voice acting and everything. They're very few and far between at first, but towards the end of the story they get more frequent. The sound here is okay when listening from the DS speakers, but through headphones, the voice acting really pops.
When you are presented with a puzzle, it shakes out something like this: You are presented a picarat score from 10 to 80 (picaracts represent the value of a puzzle, 10 being easy and 80 being really, really, hard, and basically are a score of how well you've done). you are brought to the screen where you attempt to solve the puzzle, and are given the chance the unlock hints using hint coins (you start with ten and more are hidden throughout various places, found by touching said places). The first hint is usually pretty vague, but gives you how you have to think in order to solve it, and the other two hints are usually very specific, which can lead to frustration if you already know what the hints tell you, but are stuck in some other way.
When you think to know the answer to a puzzle, you enter it via touch screen, then Layton (or Luke) appear and tell you whether you're right or wrong. If you're right, you can continue solving puzzles, if you're wrong, you can try again, but the picarat value goes down when you do re-try (about 10 %), however it only goes down twice.
The problem with this system is that it is very easily exploitable. You can save right before a puzzle, enter it, get all three hints for it, try and try again until you get it somehow, then when you get the right answer shut off and restart the game, where you'll start off right before the puzzle, answer at the ready, and get it without the loss of hint coins or picarats. Thus, completing the game without ever losing a hint coin and a perfect score is easily achievable by anyone who's figured this out. It reeks of the Ace Attorney series exploit which allowed you to breeze through the game without ever thinking, but it goes without saying that even with this little pro tip, the game is still enjoyably difficult (the hints don't always give away the answer).
There are a wide variety of puzzles, from crossing chicks and wolves to riddles, and all of these types of puzzles range from easy to mind-crushingly difficulty, especially in the later stages of the game. This means that if you're a parent or have a younger brother or sister, you can let them solve all the easy puzzles, and when they get stumped, have them come to you. If you'd rather solve all the puzzles yourself, you can do that, then go to the puzzle index and have the younger person try to solve them there.
The puzzles given to you by strangers aren't the only ones, however. Not only are there hidden puzzles throughout the various parts of St. Mystere you visit (again found by clicking random places), but throughout the course of your adventure, after completing certain puzzles, you will be given one of three things: A gizmo, a painting scrap, or a piece of furniture. Each of these things are part of their own puzzle. Gizmo's assemble a robot (which is not only effortless to do, but gives you a hint as to the ending of the game), painting scraps form a puzzle you need to put together, and you must arrange furniture to make Layton and Luke happy (maximum happiness solves the puzzle).
Completing those then unlocks bonus puzzles found in various houses, and these puzzles are decidedly harder than the ones found in the main game, and completing all of those will unlock more bonus puzzles (probably the hardest ones of all). And after that, you can download even more puzzles via the game's Wi-Fi connection, though they're all already on the card, so don't expect an endless stream of brain hurt. Needless to say, however, there's a lot of puzzle solving to go around.
Professor Layton offers a great diversion from the routine run-n-gun, hack-n-slash gameplay usually shoved down our throats, and instead shoves 120+ puzzles down your throat. The story is a great way to connect all this puzzle solving, and since not all the puzzle solving is necessary, there's a stopping point for both people who just want beat the game and hardcore completists, but the fact that have to passively play the game (by thinking a lot), may not be for fans of the aforementioned types of gameplay.
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