Level-5; 2008
Professor Layton and the Curious Village is an odd little detective game that revolves around solving puzzles, riddles, and brain-teasers in order to advance the story. The plot seems to be standard mystery fare, with zany characters trying to find a mystery item in a mysterious setting. The key to the game’s success (and addictiveness) is the odd method of interacting with the game world. Professor Layton and his sidekick travel around town via a pretty standard point-and-click interface that makes decent use of the Nintendo DS’s stylus and touch screen controls. In order to get help from the townspeople, Layton must solve puzzles for them. These include riddles, word games, the old “getting stuff across a river” standard, odd-one-out visual puzzles, sliding shapes, and so on, and increase in difficulty as the game progresses.
Against my better judgment, I started playing the game just to see what it was like, and I wasn’t able to put it down for over an hour. As such, it’s going into the open games list, but given the game’s snappy pace I suspect it won’t be there for very long.
Tags: Acquired, DS, Portable, Video Games
13 August 2008 at 12:48 am
Layton is a lot fo fun through the replay value is a bit lowish. I managed to find all but I think one of the hidden puzzles without a FAQ and managed to complete all of the muzzles save 2, one was a lame riddle that I looked up the answer to in the bonus section the other is the final puzzle, a nearly impossible “Save the Princess” puzzle.
13 August 2008 at 1:38 pm
Some of the tricks to the riddles can be pretty arbitrary and unintuitive. By and large the game is really fun. Have you tried the weekly WiFi puzzles?
13 August 2008 at 8:21 pm
I haven’t looked at anything other than the main storyline so far—I think I’ve solved about 30 puzzles so far. I’ll check out the bonus and wifi sections if I get stuck somewhere.