micro-review: Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box
I put a few video games on my Christmas list amongst the unending pile of canoe camping gear, and my sister picked me up Layton 2.
My impression was pretty much like for the first game -- good grief, what a load of old chestnuts, easy puzzles, and a random handful that actually made me think scattered in. (I am awful at the move-the-ball-through-the-field-of-sliding-bricks ones -- but they also don't dock you points on how many moves you take, so I just poke at them.)
I did consult a walkthrough once, because the instructions are ambiguous a lot (but only once did I not realize what to try. It was a puzzle where they gave you a dotted line to show one connection that was given, and told you to make connections, drawing solid lines. So I drew a solid line over the dotted one, and put the rest of my solution in. Wrong. I should have left the dotted one dotted, but I didn't think of that, I just kept second-guessing my solution even though I knew it was right.) There were a lot of mildly ambiguous puzzles -- perhaps I have been spoiled by Mystery Hunt (LESS THAN TWO WEEKS OMG!!!!) but I was not amused.
I think my least favorite puzzles were the "circle the part of the picture that is contradictory" because the pictures were blurry -- the art is beautiful, but that style does not work well for contradiction-finding, honestly. Especially not when I'm playing in natural sunlight, which the DS screen isn't great with.
The storyline was adorable, even if the plot twists were more obvious than most of the puzzles, and not quite as ridiculous as the first.
So overall, hrm. I'll play the other two and enjoy them, but I keep being disappointed. Doing hard puzzles on the DS, even with the memo function built-in, would be un-fun, as I don't carry paper with me, but it's also disappointing to have no challenge. I'm not sure how to fix that -- more variety in puzzle type? More types of puzzles that can be solved without pen and paper? Not sure. There are pretty much no wordplay puzzles, which makes sense with a localized game, but wordplay puzzles are fun! Or put in some real picross/sudoku/other common puzzle types -- not the entire game, but let them actually get tough. IDK.
I do have all the bonus stuff to play now, though I found all but 5 puzzles on my initial playthrough.
My impression was pretty much like for the first game -- good grief, what a load of old chestnuts, easy puzzles, and a random handful that actually made me think scattered in. (I am awful at the move-the-ball-through-the-field-of-sliding-bricks ones -- but they also don't dock you points on how many moves you take, so I just poke at them.)
I did consult a walkthrough once, because the instructions are ambiguous a lot (but only once did I not realize what to try. It was a puzzle where they gave you a dotted line to show one connection that was given, and told you to make connections, drawing solid lines. So I drew a solid line over the dotted one, and put the rest of my solution in. Wrong. I should have left the dotted one dotted, but I didn't think of that, I just kept second-guessing my solution even though I knew it was right.) There were a lot of mildly ambiguous puzzles -- perhaps I have been spoiled by Mystery Hunt (LESS THAN TWO WEEKS OMG!!!!) but I was not amused.
I think my least favorite puzzles were the "circle the part of the picture that is contradictory" because the pictures were blurry -- the art is beautiful, but that style does not work well for contradiction-finding, honestly. Especially not when I'm playing in natural sunlight, which the DS screen isn't great with.
The storyline was adorable, even if the plot twists were more obvious than most of the puzzles, and not quite as ridiculous as the first.
So overall, hrm. I'll play the other two and enjoy them, but I keep being disappointed. Doing hard puzzles on the DS, even with the memo function built-in, would be un-fun, as I don't carry paper with me, but it's also disappointing to have no challenge. I'm not sure how to fix that -- more variety in puzzle type? More types of puzzles that can be solved without pen and paper? Not sure. There are pretty much no wordplay puzzles, which makes sense with a localized game, but wordplay puzzles are fun! Or put in some real picross/sudoku/other common puzzle types -- not the entire game, but let them actually get tough. IDK.
I do have all the bonus stuff to play now, though I found all but 5 puzzles on my initial playthrough.