Professor Layton and the Curious Village (DS)

Afternoon teatime with brain-bending flair.
2/28/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

Think back to grade school and consider your reaction to being handed the following: "The first letter of the alphabet is A, and the letter B comes after the letter A. However, the letter you need to worry about is the last one. What's the last letter of the alphabet?"

If you've already got the answer to the above question, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is just the game for you. If you stopped reading the question halfway through out of disgust, you can safely move on to another game!

OK, so maybe it's not quite that simple. There's a lot more to Layton than just brain teasers, logic puzzles and geometry. It has a charming cast led by a very proper English gentleman -- the good professor himself -- and his precocious assistant, Luke. They've been summoned to a small village to locate a treasure called the Golden Apple after learning of the death of the town's wealthiest man, Baron Reinhold. You travel through this watercolor world as Layton and Luke uncover the plot while solving puzzles of all sorts, including the mystery of the Apple.

Much care has been taken in crafting this curious village. Even on the Nintendo DS' small screens, you can revel in the hand-drawn details of each static screen. Animation sequences run in full-motion video that looks every bit as good as the best that anime filmmakers have to offer, and these interludes are complemented by a fantastic voice acting cast. Neither are let down by the musical score, which is as memorable as any of the best from the 16-bit era of videogames. Presentation is the game's strongest suit, even down to the excellent touch-screen interface and the graphic style of the puzzles themselves.

Ah, the puzzles -- that's the heart of the game and where it can easily go sour. Brain teasers simply aren't for everyone and if you're the type that bristles at them, even the compelling mystery storyline won't be able to keep you around. It's very easy to get stumped if you're not the logical type. Heck, it's often easy to get stumped precisely because you're the logical type! When this happens, you have a few ways out: Use the game's easily located hint coins to get some nudges in the right direction, beat your head bloody against a wall without ever understanding just what it is the game is asking, or flip to an Internet hint guide for the answer.

No matter which of the above dislodges you from a particularly devious puzzle, these failures grind the game to a halt. As you close in on the story's conclusion, that works heavily against your enjoyment of its significant charms. Like all good handheld games, this game benefits from being played in short bursts. Extended sessions will almost certainly leave you with a bad taste in your mouth over some stupid puzzle you should've been able to figure out in five seconds but instead spent an hour or more pondering -- all while your battery runs down into the red.

With over 100 puzzles to solve, the game is rather lengthy. A complete play-through should take somewhere around 15 to 20 hours depending how long you stare at a bunch of matches wondering just which one to flip around in order to turn a picture of a dog from one standing up into one that's been run over. It also doesn't end at the final cut scene. New puzzles become available via Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection each week and are easily downloaded and attempted outside the game's story structure. It's also unlikely that you will find all the puzzles on your first trip to the end, so the game kindly allows you to explore the world and take on any that you might have missed, along with some extra difficult challenges from Layton himself.