Thankfully, Professor Layton and the Curious Village falls into the first category. What is most surprising about Professor Layton and the Curious Village is the seamlessly divine marriage that it portrays with its deft balance between story and gameplay. Like Puzzle Quest before it, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a title that will forever change gamer's perceptions on a particular genre. As you start playing the game you'll quickly find that this title is so much more than a simple collection of brain teasers.
Your puzzling experience begins with the introduction of the unusual Professor Layton and his faithful young assistant Luke as they travel to the curious village of St. Mystere - a place where puzzles and brain teasers are as commonplace as a controller in a gamer's hand. As the name suggests, you'll find that mystery is always afoot in village of St. Mystere. Following the death of a wealthy baron, his will has revealed that a secret treasure is stashed away in a secret location within the quaint village. To track down the mysterious treasure, the Baron's family must solve a variety of riddles, or as it turns out, hire Professor Layton and Luke to do the job for them. When one of the baron's family member's falls victim to a suspicious death, Professor Layton believes that murder may be afoot.
As you sit through the animated cut scenes, you'll notice that the game's visuals are quite reminiscent of the popular Howl's Moving Castle and Spirited Away animated films. Cut scenes aside, this also translates wonderfully to the in-game action. The hand drawn characters, the quaint air of Ye Olde Village that St. Mystere gives off with its 19th Century setting coupled with the soundtrack of music with a mysterious lilt to it, leaves you feeling like St. Mystere is a living, breathing town of old world charm on your DS, something that has been severely lacking in other third-party developed DS titles.
"It was Colonel Mustard, in the kitchen with the candlestick!"
Aside from the stylish class that Professor Layton and the Curious Village exudes, you'll find that there is much substance contained within. The game treads a careful balance between storytelling and puzzles, containing only segments of information to keep the story moving rather than making you furiously tap your stylus to get to the puzzles.
The game is seamlessly controlled via the formidable touch screen and stylus combination, with the puzzles also making good use of the DS's dual-screen setup. The control scheme ventures into traditional adventure gaming territory with much of it styled upon the point-and-click mechanics of the genre to navigate your way around the game. To uncover the mystery within the game, you'll need to click on items within the area which will usually result in uncovering a puzzle, finding hidden coins or providing a clue to be used later on. Most of the time, you'll find yourself conversing with villagers to gather more information to progress through the adventure portion of the game.
While it's all good and well to include a storyline to add some meat to the gameplay, the greatest strength of the title is within its puzzles. At its core, Professor Layton and the Curious Village features over one hundred and twenty puzzles, but most gamers will find that only 80 or 90 are required to complete the story mode. For those times when you just feel like having a quick puzzle session, the game also allows you to play through the story mode puzzles without having to play through the game's story mode. As well as being able to play all of the puzzles which you have unlocked during the course of the story, this mode also throws up some ultra-tricky puzzles that will require all of your brain power to solve. If you manage to work your way through all of the puzzles, Nintendo is also offering players a new set of puzzles each week, which are available as free downloadable content via your Nintendo Wi-Fi connection. The free downloadables are reportedly only going to be available for a limited time.
The types of puzzles on offer are quite varied and ultimately keep boredom from creeping in, as you will be able to solve such problems as: completing a maze, solving math problems, answering riddles and moving objects from point A to point B in a certain number of moves. The difficulty of the puzzles varies, ranging from too easy to fairly difficult, but the game's built-in hint system - which you can access by collecting hint coins which are spread throughout the game - will soon put you on the right track. Best of all, while the puzzles can prove difficult in certain sections of the game, they are rarely ever frustrating thanks to both the hint system and the fact that none of the puzzles are timed, allowing you to sit down and ponder the answer away from the DS. In fact you'll find that the game continuously jumps between a set of puzzles that force you to think outside the square and puzzles that have the simplest answer staring you in the face. Many times you'll find that you're not completely clueless, you've actually just over thought the solution.
Whether they prove to be easy or hard, you'll find all the game's puzzles are entertaining.
For all its fun, the game does contain a few minor problems which keep it from being an absolutely perfect game. Firstly is the three tiered hint system which allows you to choose a hint based upon a scale of how many coins you want to spend. You'll find that by handing over one or two coins, you've actually just wasted your hint coin as that hint level doesn't really provide you with adequate information.
The second flaw that the game has is that it sometimes doesn’t read the numbers and letters that you have inputted correctly. As the puzzles are solved using the touch screen, often requiring you to write your answer on the screen, having an answer that doesn’t always translate into what you want can be a great sticking point. Of course, this can often be avoided if your writing doesn't look like chicken scratch, but still it will frustrate those of us that don't have beautiful penmanship.
As a whole, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a game that will keep you occupied for hours. Whether you choose to play in short spurts or a marathon session, you'll find that its delightful combination of adventure, mystery and brain teasing fun will be worth every cent.
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