Professor Layton and the Curious Village
by Nintendo
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Video Game Reviews of Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Customer Review: Wonderful Brain Teasers
Summary: 4 Stars
Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a mystery adventure game interspersed with a variety of puzzles. We follow the Professor and his young assistant Luke around the very mysterious village of St. Mystere as they search for the equally mysterious Golden Apple.
The game has been lovingly crafted with a distinctive visual style that should appeal to children and grown-ups alike. If you've seen Les Triplettes De Belleville or are familiar with the films of Studio Ghibli then you will instantly feel at home in St. Mystere. The various locations around the village - as well as its inhabitants - have a distinctive hand-drawn appearance and the story has a habit of shooting off in unexpected directions.
Like all the best DS games, it's hard to imagine playing this one on any other portable system. Whilst exploring the village, the upper screen shows a map of your local area. A scene from the village is displayed below and navigated via a simple point-and-tap system. Hidden 'puzzle coins' - the game's currency - as well as hidden puzzles are found by tapping on barrels, windows and other items on the lower screen. Villagers can be selected to talk to and more often than not, they will help you only after completing one of the 120-odd puzzles that really make this game what it is.
Clearly a lot of effort has been put into compiling the game's collection of puzzles. They usually require lateral thinking, are often maths puzzles disguised as every-day situations and there are a fair number of what I'd consider trick questions and 'gotchas' to catch you out. If you get stuck, hint coins can be exchanged for clues and if you get the answer wrong, your score decreases as you try a second or third time.
The range of puzzle difficulty varies greatly and there are bound to be a few harder ones that stump just about everyone. On a few occasions, I found myself annoyed by the answer I was expected to give. But overall, as the Professor is often heard to say, 'Every puzzle has an answer', no matter whether you got it straight away or kicked yourself when it finally came to you.
While 120 puzzles may seem like a lot, the game ended too soon for me. Perhaps that's a good sign; I spent over ten hours in the Curious Village before the story reached its conclusion but it's certainly no epic. But if there's a lack of quantity, it is easily made up in quality.
Customer Review: perfect for puzzlers
Summary: 5 Stars
I love puzzles and this game is full of them. The puzzles range from very simple to very hard. The graffics are great.Customer Review: Fun, but disappointingly easy and short
Summary: 4 Stars
Let's get one thing out of the way. This is one amazingly presented game. Art style, character designs, animated sequences, voice acting, music.... Everything about this game exudes its unique personality that you don't find often in games. Plus, the story is fun, and the interface is near flawless (my only complaint is that some hidden items require a bit *too* precise of a click with the stylus to reveal -- a truly minor complaint). This is top-notch stuff.
If there is one thing that this point-and-click adventure + brainteaser game let me down, it's the difficulty of the puzzles. They are mostly too easy.
I like puzzles. I like games that depend on logic (like Minesweeper or Picross). But I am not one to go out of my way to FIND puzzles -- i.e., I don't buy puzzle books, and I don't scour puzzle sites to find puzzles to solve. I solve what comes my way. (This is probably the best place to mention that I got this game as a birthday gift.)
And I have to say, I found myself breezing through most of the puzzles. I recognized a good number of puzzles from elsewhere, and a lot of the questions were simple trick questions where all you have to do is discard the superfluous information the question throws at you. Yes, there ARE tough puzzles (some took me more than an hour to figure out), but they are much too few and far in between.
I completed the game -- including finding and solving all 135 puzzles the game has to offer -- in roughly 16 hours with about 160 Hint Coins left. I have read online posts where people claimed to have finished the game in less than 10 hours, and I don't doubt them. (Hint Coins are hidden items in the game that you can use to get hints about a puzzle, one hint for one Hint Coin. Needless to say, I found a lot, and didn't use many. I think I used about 15 Hint Coins total. Surely I would have finished the game sooner if I wasn't so stingy with the coins.)
Also hurting is the fact that once you beat the game, there really is no reason to come back to it. Sure, you can download weekly puzzles over Wifi, but it's just one puzzle per week, and most are "oh that's easy" variety. (Someone at Nintendo or Level-5 should proofread the downloadable puzzles, by the way. One puzzle says "cube" when it clearly means "square.")
All in all, I did have a lot of fun with this game. As I said previously, the presentation of this game really adds a lot of charm to what could have been a boring collection of puzzles. And I really liked the story. It's a shame that most of those puzzles were not very challenging.
Recommended, but don't expect tons of playtime, especially if you consider yourself to be good at logic puzzles.
Customer Review: A game for older adults
Summary: 5 Stars
My son gave me a DS for Christmas '07. I have bought several brain games and love them all. But I enjoyed this one the best. I am 49 years young, and enjoyed the puzzles and the stories. Some of the puzzles seem simple enough-until you try to solve them. Excellent game-would recommend this to everyone! Customer Review: This game is great!
Summary: 5 Stars
I had a lot of fun playing this game. If you like working puzzles, you'll love it. Sometimes I felt like it was a little tedious when I had to walk all the way to the other side of town, but only because I was so into solving the puzzles.