Vital Stats

Genre: Puzzle with just a hint of adventure
Players: 1 + everyone you beg for help
Online: Downloadable Puzzles

Developer: Level 5
Publisher: Nintendo
ESRB Rating: E
Release Date: 2/10/08

Platforms

• DS

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is both the oldest and newest puzzle game you’ll play all year. Beneath the lovely retro aesthetic and slick DS interface beat the merciless hearts of 130 puzzles. If you can work your way past the abject humiliation of getting everything wrong, the game is a fresh take on classic mindbenders and is absolutely worth the 10 hours you’ll sink into it.

Welcome to St. Mystere
Professor Layton and the Curious Village follows the exploits of gentleman archeologist and renowned puzzle enthusiast Hershel Layton. The professor and his apprentice Luke are called to the remote village of St. Mystere to help resolve mysteries surrounding the will of local rich corpse, Agustus Reinhold.

Along the way to solving these mysteries, Layton and Luke will explore the town and meet its quirky inhabitants, each of whom is so pathologically obsessed with puzzles that they’ll casually interrupt murder investigations for the thrill of intellectual exercise. This mix of exploration punctuated by puzzle solving encapsulates the majority of gameplay.

Take Only Puzzles, Leave Only Footprints
Exploration of St. Mystere is carried out via the touch screen. For the most part, tapping on objects reveals puzzles, hidden goodies, or nothing. It’s not particularly compelling; it’s just a touch redressing of the mouse interfaces of Myst-type games. That is, you touch something and it’s interactive or it isn’t. Unfortunately, there’s a whole lot of isn’t, and tapping on every nook and cranny is both tiresome and a great way to culture a repetitive stress injury.

However, while Layton and the Curious Village feels and interacts like an old-school adventure game, the meat is in the puzzles. Genre fans should be alerted that these aren’t Resident Evil puzzles (brass crest goes into fireplace slot), adventure puzzles (hilariously flammable dwarf goes into fireplace slot) or Tetris puzzles (there’s very few blocks in St. Mystere and none of them fall), but the kind of classic puzzles you saw in school, or could find in a Mensa quiz. The puzzles are in the same vein as The Tower of Hanoi and basic logic puzzles. Make no mistake, even though the game is E for everyone, many of these puzzles have been stumping people for centuries and will show mercy to no man, woman, or child.

While most adults will have at least seen and maybe even solved the majority of the puzzles in the game, what really makes them shine is the ways the DS allows you to interact with them. Where the touch screen is mundane in the adventure sections, the puzzles allow you to shift tiles, place weights on scales, and stretch rubber bands around pegs. Layton lets you draw on 75% of his puzzles, and the rest are either multiple choice or require some kind of manipulative. It doesn’t technically add anything new to centenarian puzzles such as these, but it does let you carry more than a hundred of them in your pocket with an instantly accessible interface.

The game isn’t entirely pitiless when it comes to the solutions, either. Hidden throughout the exploration sections are a finite number of hint coins, one of which can be used to unlock one or more of three hints per puzzle. These hints range in usefulness from “look harder” to “here’s the path to the solution,” but the limited coin availability is a high stakes resource conservation game unto itself–some of the game’s final puzzles and bonus puzzles are quite nasty.

Hints and accessibility notwithstanding, the puzzle interface isn’t all roses. While the ability to draw on puzzles is extremely welcome in this type of game, your stylus doesn’t seem to come equipped with an eraser. Instead, you’re offered a button that wipes the whole screen. So if you’re tracing the outlines of hidden shapes or balancing algebraic equations, if you make a niggling error, you can choose to live with it or invoke artistic armageddon on all your work.

Saving the game isn’t supremely convenient either. It’s only possible to save between puzzles, meaning that whatever pictures and notes you scribble can’t be saved. The DS’s sleep feature largely ameliorates the problem, but it would have been nice to be able to deactivate the console. On the other hand, being able to save your work would probably cut into the available free space reserved for downloading puzzles, so perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing.

Both these problems are quibbles, though. The limited instructions the game actually offers are hardly necessary and casual players should have no trouble getting settled and actually accessing the gameplay.

Come for the Scenery. Stay Because You’re Trapped.
If the masochistic joy of puzzle solving isn’t quite enough to drag you through Layton’s adventures, then the quality of the game’s presentation may make the sale. Despite the DS’s limited resolution, Layton and the Curious Village sports lovely hand-drawn sprites whose wholly cohesive artistic style falls somewhere between manga and Madeline. Surprisingly, the average of these two styles makes the village and its inhabitants feel deliciously European. At the same time, all the townsfolk have a charmingly distinctive ugliness, reminiscent of some of the NPCs in Zelda titles. They’re not unpleasant, but are nevertheless memorable for their quirks and flaws.

The voice work, while presumably limited by the SD card’s capacity constraints, is top notch. Layton comes off as soft spoken, genteel, and thoughtful, while his kid sidekick might as well be selling newspapers on a 1920′s street corner. The music doesn’t fare quite so well, as nearly half the songs are just different riffs on the same theme, but what it lacks in diversity it recovers with an altogether novel and pleasant focus on the accordion. While perhaps not the most popular instrument in the history of music, it is reproduced here with a comfortable level of fidelity and bolsters the game’s early 20th century vibe.

The game’s story is a pretty ridiculous excuse to allow everyone who moves (and a few who don’t) to provide a relentless march of puzzles. It’s a bit camp and initially comes off as stupid, but it soon becomes humorous, and eventually settles on endearingly eccentric. Honestly, it’s no worse than every other stilted excuse to drive gameplay that passes for narrative in most games, and at least Layton has some personality.

For skilled and dedicated puzzlers who happen to like the presentation, successful completion of puzzles earns a currency called picurats. As more picurats are earned, players can access the game’s voice samples, artwork, and movies. Since puzzles are also unlocked for free play as you complete them, this means that most of the game is at your fingertips once you’ve completed it. Of course, having completed the game, you’ll have already seen it all, but this feature makes it easier to share parts of the game with friends.

Every Puzzle Has an Answer
The cynical might characterize St. Mystere as a candy coating (perhaps tasty, but empty calories nonetheless) for what is effectively just another minigame compilation on the DS. However, the interaction between the game’s adventure and puzzle qualities makes St. Mystere feel like an interesting place to explore where there are lots of things to keep you entertained. Alone, the adventure sections would feel dull, the puzzles would just amount to Brain Training, and the story would be a ridiculous frivolity, but the whole is somehow greater.

Go out and grab a copy. You’ll love it when you’re not busy hating it for outwitting you.

What It Costs: $30

What It’s Worth:

• To The Hardcore: $30 (buy)
• To The Genre Fan: $30 (buy)
• To The Casual: $30 (buy)