Professor Layton: Every puzzle has an answer (even puzzles that are smelly)
A smelly man at Target sold me Professor Layton and the Curious Village about a week ago. He smelled really bad, like emergency bad, and I've had a moral crisis over the past week wondering if I should have alerted his fellow employees, or his supervisors, or the local health board-anyone in a position to break the news to him gently, to shuffle him off to a shower or, at the very least, a bathroom. It's humiliating to buy video games at Target in the first place, since you have to ask permission to have opened their cabinet of valuable shrinkage-prone products-you have to take on the role of penitent thief-but it's doubly humiliating to point through the glass at what a pungent man in a red shirt calls "oh, you want Curious Valley," then slink behind him to the register at what should have been a safe, odor-free distance, but which wasn't, god help us all. His sticky stink haunted the first few days of my ownership of this game. Just looking at the cover would call forth the scent, and for hours it would flit here and there in my nose, emerging phantom-like from the combination of commonplace aromatic molecules of the household or city. After a few days (mercifully), the pong exorcised itself from my nose and my memory, but I will forever associate Professor Layton with those brief, panicked moments of conviction: that I had been irrevocably tainted.
As for the game itself: it's awesome. I finished it yesterday. And by "finished" I mean finished: 135/135 puzzles, 5000+ picarats (not sure if this is enough to unlock all the bonus content?), maybe I missed a few hint coins somewhere, and the portion of the game available only to owners of the sequel is still, of course, virgin territory, but I think I did a thorough job of putting this baby to bed. I don't think I've ever devoured a DS game with such intensity, not even Phantom Hourglass.
The thing is, I don't even like brainteasers. I used to groan and gnash my teeth in junior high math class when the teacher would hand them out, all grids and trick questions and "John says Tim is lying, but Tim has a ham sandwich, who is the owner of the yellow automobile?!" What Professor Layton does best is show that pretty much any task can be fun if you give it a good interface. When I talk about "interface" here I don't just mean the touch screen-though the touch screen is indispensable, since it provides the ability sketch, visualize, and use trial-and-error problem solving techniques-I'm talking how the game facilitates your play. You want to solve these brainteasers.
Why? All the low-level rewards, for one thing: solving a puzzle earns you picarats (the game's name for points) and various items that can be used in the "minigames" (for lack of a better term). Painting scraps can be assembled (in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle) into a completed painting; gizmos combine to form a mysterious machine, whose nature becomes more clear as you gather more gizmos. My favorite task (shades of Animal Crossing) was collecting furniture to put in Layton's and Luke's rooms at the Inn. A few item-collecting endorphins go a long way, and Layton isn't miserly with them.
The hint system is done well, and contributes to the pleasure of the puzzle. You need "hint coins" to get a hint, but I never found myself a pauper-the coins are scattered liberally around town, like rupees in tall grass. The hints are subtle but clear gestures, like scratching your eyebrow when you want to leave a party; they indicate not a path to the solution, but a path toward the "a-ha!" moment when you understand the puzzle and, with that blazing knowledge, slay it verily. The game wants you to feel satisfied, not stupid.
It doesn't hurt that the story is engaging, and the art is fantastic: the backdrops and character designs pay homage to the bande dessinée (somewhere between Hergé and Belleville) while retaining a distinct flavor. Visually and textually engaging from start to finish. (I wasn't so hot on the animated sequences, which seem to have been executed by a different team. They showed little understanding of the rest of the game's art, and came off as little more than milquetoast animé.)
So it's fun, it's addictive, it's beautiful. But also: it's bizarre. A town full of people who break into puzzles the way that residents of River City might burst into song is strange enough, but then when you get into the specifics of the story-ostriches who wear cakes as hats, talking pairs of sunglasses, a tiny, large-nosed man who lives in your pockets and sings traditional Scottish ballads, accompanying himself with an equally tiny brass and ivory concertina, and in the end it all turns out to have been the dream of a drunken Aral Sea-you come to fully recognize the title's quirkiness. None of those things are actually in the game (I don't want to spoil it for you!) but rest assured there are elements of tantamount eccentricity. Or maybe it's just a normal level of Japanese eccentricity, distended by its presence in what, when you boil it down, is more or less a brain training game.
Anyway, I recommend it.
As for the game itself: it's awesome. I finished it yesterday. And by "finished" I mean finished: 135/135 puzzles, 5000+ picarats (not sure if this is enough to unlock all the bonus content?), maybe I missed a few hint coins somewhere, and the portion of the game available only to owners of the sequel is still, of course, virgin territory, but I think I did a thorough job of putting this baby to bed. I don't think I've ever devoured a DS game with such intensity, not even Phantom Hourglass.
The thing is, I don't even like brainteasers. I used to groan and gnash my teeth in junior high math class when the teacher would hand them out, all grids and trick questions and "John says Tim is lying, but Tim has a ham sandwich, who is the owner of the yellow automobile?!" What Professor Layton does best is show that pretty much any task can be fun if you give it a good interface. When I talk about "interface" here I don't just mean the touch screen-though the touch screen is indispensable, since it provides the ability sketch, visualize, and use trial-and-error problem solving techniques-I'm talking how the game facilitates your play. You want to solve these brainteasers.
Why? All the low-level rewards, for one thing: solving a puzzle earns you picarats (the game's name for points) and various items that can be used in the "minigames" (for lack of a better term). Painting scraps can be assembled (in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle) into a completed painting; gizmos combine to form a mysterious machine, whose nature becomes more clear as you gather more gizmos. My favorite task (shades of Animal Crossing) was collecting furniture to put in Layton's and Luke's rooms at the Inn. A few item-collecting endorphins go a long way, and Layton isn't miserly with them.
The hint system is done well, and contributes to the pleasure of the puzzle. You need "hint coins" to get a hint, but I never found myself a pauper-the coins are scattered liberally around town, like rupees in tall grass. The hints are subtle but clear gestures, like scratching your eyebrow when you want to leave a party; they indicate not a path to the solution, but a path toward the "a-ha!" moment when you understand the puzzle and, with that blazing knowledge, slay it verily. The game wants you to feel satisfied, not stupid.
It doesn't hurt that the story is engaging, and the art is fantastic: the backdrops and character designs pay homage to the bande dessinée (somewhere between Hergé and Belleville) while retaining a distinct flavor. Visually and textually engaging from start to finish. (I wasn't so hot on the animated sequences, which seem to have been executed by a different team. They showed little understanding of the rest of the game's art, and came off as little more than milquetoast animé.)
So it's fun, it's addictive, it's beautiful. But also: it's bizarre. A town full of people who break into puzzles the way that residents of River City might burst into song is strange enough, but then when you get into the specifics of the story-ostriches who wear cakes as hats, talking pairs of sunglasses, a tiny, large-nosed man who lives in your pockets and sings traditional Scottish ballads, accompanying himself with an equally tiny brass and ivory concertina, and in the end it all turns out to have been the dream of a drunken Aral Sea-you come to fully recognize the title's quirkiness. None of those things are actually in the game (I don't want to spoil it for you!) but rest assured there are elements of tantamount eccentricity. Or maybe it's just a normal level of Japanese eccentricity, distended by its presence in what, when you boil it down, is more or less a brain training game.
Anyway, I recommend it.