Professor Layton Series

Published: 31 Aug 2024
Last updated: 1 Sep 2024

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

Professor Layton and the Curious Village Boxart

The Professor Layton series is an odd one when explained in a bare-bones fashion, combining the DSs “brain training” puzzle genre and attaching a story onto it, complete with various characters and a unique setting - but even in this first foray the formula works surprisingly well.

The game begins as you follow the two main protagonists Professor Layton, a charming top-hat wearing gentleman and Luke, a cheeky and playful younger boy and Layton’s apprentice/sidekick, travelling into the main location of St. Mystere, a quaint English village, in order to solve the mystery of the “Golden Apple”. Soon after arriving, a murder occurs kicking off the plot, and you are required to explore the village in search of clues, often needing to converse with the puzzle-obsessed residents of St. Mystere.

The game really oozes comfiness and charm, there’s a real laid back atmosphere throughout (which make the occasional twists and dramatic scenes hit all the more harder) that makes exploring St. Mystere just extremely pleasurable, which is all fuelled by the beautiful art style that would easily belong in a good children’s book… and then there a bunch of puzzles tacked on as well for the gameplay.

There’s no bones about it, the puzzle ‘integration’ within the actual story is very weak, and it would seem like it would get old/boring quickly… yet it simply just doesn’t. There’s an awful lot of variety in both content and presentation and so each puzzle put forward feels like a brand new challenge to solve. With no time limit, hints for each puzzle, with a lot of them skippable or can be retried at a later date, you never feel helplessly stuck. The game may provide all these questions, puzzles and challenges but it also wants you to succeed and take great pleasure at answering them, one at a time. The quality of puzzle does tend to slip a little towards the end, but it takes much longer than one would expect.

I’d also recommend having a pen and paper to hand when playing, as a lack of a good memo/notepad function can really be felt after having experienced some of the subsequent sequels.

Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box/the Diabolical Box

Professor Layton and Pandora's Box Boxart

The second in the Professor Layton series, and it does exactly what a sequel should do. It takes what works from the first (which is most of it!) and continues the formula with a few improvements here and there - for example the puzzles are definitely more integrated into the story, and the presence of small QoL features, e.g. Memo, Diary etc. are extremely welcomed.

The story itself is a lot more ambitious, complex and involves multiple locations (The Molentary Express, Dropstone and Folsense) which is certainly welcome, and some of the locations, namely Dropstone were extremely enjoyable to explore. Despite this ambition, I did find the progression between different locations to be a little disjointed at times? The great plot-twist reveal at the end is also unfortunately a little underwhelming.

We also see further emphasis of little mini-games as begun in Curious Village (although there wasn’t all that much there), which are fun but do feel a little tacked on - and I appear to be in the minority in finding the Tea Set minigame annoying to complete.

A small, solid improvement from Curious Village.