better sense of scale than the first regarding both its central mystery and its locales. for one, you're given much more room to stretch your legs, with the second half of the game taking place in an area roughly the size of the entire first game and the first half having a few beefy areas of its own. the multiple mysteries in this one indeed also expand beyond the big endgame twist, and more care has been taken to drop breadcrumbs of intrigue throughout the adventure rather than the meandering approach of curious village. at the same time, the larger cast of characters and tragic lover's bond at the heart of the narrative makes the lack of attention paid to their actual characterization more noticeable. an examination of the folly of a rich family mining the earth and bringing ruin on their workers becomes didactic quickly when it's conveyed entirely through history lessons and layton's personal observations, and the writers' preoccupation with preserving the shock of the primary mystery keeps the actual humans at the core of the conflict from expressing themselves until the final ten minutes. I've cooled off on curious village's twist in the couple of years since I played it, and even though this one is probably more interesting, it still feels like a sudden burst of passion at the end of another meandering 15 hour adventure. then again, more pretty backgrounds than last time, so it all comes out in the wash.

puzzles in general are now better integrated into the story; layton still lives in an alternate reality where everyone is obsessed with puzzles, but at least he's actually using his skill at solving them in practical ways to navigate the world and solve mysteries. I'll hesitatingly say that conceptual puzzles seem to be fewer in number compared to curious village, with more focus on various physical layout puzzles and some math ones here and there. conceptual puzzles have the strength of obfuscating a solution space and thus making the exercise feel more like a product of reasoning and less trial and error, but I do also appreciate the variety of layout puzzles here, especially when it comes to ones like chopping wood in the right place to make a square or placing lanterns to cover every path of a forest. tired of maze puzzles tho; really no mental leaps required for them beyond just following each path to the right place. those are really the other extreme compared to conceptual puzzles, where the whole solution space is there for you to look at and you just check off whatever path leads to the finish. the best conceptual puzzles come on the critical path at least, so you won't miss any of them.

there's also better scaffolding around the ADV parts of the experience to keep exploration fresh thanks to some new integrated minigames. there's a persistent puzzle with an exercising hamster you must lead around a grid in order to have him reach a step count, and by solving puzzles around the world you can win items with new properties for him to chase. the puzzle itself is cool, and having a variety of ways to reach the maximum step count goes a long way to making the puzzle feel less prescriptive. when that's reached, he'll pop up in the world to tell you where you can find hint coins, removing the pixel hunting component of the game completely. there's camera components you can find as well that, once assembled, can be used to take pictures of specific rooms in the game. this opens up a "find the differences" type game that will open up a bonus puzzle; another neat addition that complements the main draw nicely. the third is less interesting: you can win different tea ingredients to make people tea? in-game there's no benefit to doing this, although I have a feeling some of the post-game puzzles will unlock if you can serve all the different kinds of tea. problem is figuring out all of the different brews is complete trial-and-error, and although some NPCs will give you recipes, others are much more vague. would help if some NPCs who want tea didn't suddenly stop wanting tea if you fuck up their initial order, though considering that they randomly re-enable later I have a feeling this is just some scripting issue.

I remember not being great at this game. Compared to the other Layton games I always struggled on this one, but when I decided to come back to it…that was what added to its charm.

The story picks itself back up from curious village, Layton and his apprentice Luke are back on the case to this time crack the mystery of the Elysian box. The journey takes them on a great train ride to many places but the one that sticks out is definitely folsense. The story does almost kind of copy curious village but there’s a difference, it’s almost as if the game wants you to know the town isn’t real and hints at it heavily. Unlike in curious village where it’s hidden as much as possible, but I like how they do that. And need I say more about anton’s story? I won’t spoil it but let’s just say even if it was short, it didn’t stop me from crying.

Overall, it seems like the games really started to boost themselves up at this point and I loved every minute of it.

Puzzles are heavily challenging but likeable, Story is a major highlight, Sammy

Pandora's Box (or Diabolical Box if you wanna be all American about this) is a very familiar feeling to Curious Village (or Curious Village if you wanna be all American about this). But it's definitely got improvements. Most notable, to me at least, is the introduction of a memo pad. In the last game only certain puzzles let you use the touch screen to take notes, but now every puzzle has a dedicated memo pad function. I would say the screen to write on is a bit small, but still (might be worth noting that I played on a 2DS XL so maybe the OG DS with the OG stylus was better?).

It also has more varied and interesting locations. I loved the first town you visit in the game, so it's a shame you don't get to go back there, but I still like Folsense too. The only real downside to this, if you wanna count it, is that it means certain hint coins are permanently missable from these starting locations. Luckily no puzzle is ever missable, as like the last game there's a dedicated spot to house any puzzle that is tied to a specific chapter that you didn't run in to.

As weird as it sounds for a visual novel, I don't play these games for the story (I just like brain teasers), so I won't say if the plot is any better or worse than before. It's got the same charm, yet weirdly feels like it's aimed at very young kids despite tackling themes like murder, and puzzles that I wouldn't expect the 5 year old certain dialogue and tone seems to market to, to be able to solve.

Speaking of the puzzles, I guess that's where this game hits its biggest snag. Might have been less noticeable on release with a year between them (in Japan they came out in the same year???), but playing the games close to each other you notice how many puzzles are just reworded or otherwise retooled versions of the last games puzzles. Like last game would have you divide a 5x5 square with images on it into 4 sections, so that every section contained the same images of equal amounts. You can find a couple of that exact puzzle here, just with new images so a new set-up can be tied to the explanation. And there's still a ton of block puzzles. I'm not a fan of those... If you are then you're in for a treat.

But no matter what type of puzzles you are a fan of, there's a lot of variety. I'm personally drawn to those ones that give you 5 or so suspects and you get a certain amount of detail of each one, so you have to work out who is lying. I'm really bad at anything involving shapes and trying to imagine flattened cubes as 3D ones. If you only care about completing the story you can skip many. I think you need to complete 80/138 story puzzles to complete the game? At the very least that was the last gated checkpoint I remember seeing. If you're like me you'll just use a guide for the ones that stump you... Don't worry, I didn't set it to mastered!

But I do wanna give the puzzles some credit in this game too. Many of them are much better tied in to what's going on in the story. There's still a lot of "I have no information to give you, but how about a random puzzle!" or "I'm not sure about that, but it reminds me of a puzzle about a similar thing" (so expect a lot of box-based puzzles), but now many puzzles seem like the characters are actually solving them in-universe to work through their quest.

There are also a small amount of those game-wide puzzles that are housed in your briefcase. They're a bit more involved this time too. The most complex has you getting camera parts as rewards from specific puzzles, then finding specific spots on the map to take a picture, then playing a spot the difference game, then finding the secret puzzle from the finished picture. It's puzzles on top of puzzles!

The cutscenes still amaze me for what they pulled off on the DS, and there's even more of them now!

Certain minor things that bugged me from the original are still present too. Like when searching for hint coins you can too often hit random objects that have Layton or Luke say something in a pop-up box, which sounds small (and it is), but given how hint coins could be literally anything, it's annoying to be spam tapping the screen and getting the same box over and over. Traversing long distances is also a pain as you have to keep pressing the movement button in the bottom right to open up the arrows for the next screen.

If you've played the first game you won't need selling on this one. You'll know if you'll love it or hate it.

What has four legs in the morning and two legs in the afternoon?

That's right! It's the Layton games! The Curious Village crawled so that the Diabolical Box could run.

Almost every aspect of the prequel is improved on. The primary for me was the puzzles being more intertwined with the game progression and the mystery. It's less "this reminds me of a puzzle" or "prove me you are the real Layton" and more like you are solving problems to discover something or find a new lead. It's hard to explain but in the last game it almost feels like you are watching a movie but every 5 minutes a sudoku appears in the screen and you must solve it if you wanna keep watching.

It's a minor thing but I also like that the sprites aren't looking directly at my soul and face each other like they would in a conversation. The scenario are also a upgrade because you explore more scenarios than just a village. The Molentary Express is really elegant and gives me more of the London atmosphere, Dropstone is a charming bucolic village but where you spend the most time and is the most interesting location is the town of Folsense. The lights and the sense of decadence really sells it for me.

The mystery of the Elysian Box is also more intriguing than the Golden Apple and the narrative flows better. I still can't decide if I like or not the resolution but it works in the theme and the message. The Diabolical Box is a lot about greed, decadence and letting the past go.

The puzzles I feel that are also more fun this time, maybe because it seems to have less math and sliding boxes. For the chess puzzle, The Knight's Tour was a lot harder and more unfun than Too Many Queens and I couldn't solve Disappearing Act 6 by myself, but it was still nice.

I also want to talk a bit about Layton and Luke. They have a dinamic like Sherlock and Watson in a sense. Layton always seems to be two steps ahead of everyone but keep it to himself and it's almost like a hero in old stories, where he is a perfect being able to do everything. Luke is more naive and sometimes is almost like the voice of reason not buying some bs or being like "it's really the time for a puzzle now?". They are really good at being those archetypes but I wonder if there are more to them than this. In two games they have basically no character development and we don't see that many facets other than the regular one. I'm not saying that this is bad and it must change, it's just something that I would like to see being worked on in a interesting way.

I have high hopes for the next game because it seems to be a fan favourite and is the last main series game chronogically. Trials and Tribulation is the game that elevates Ace Attorney to a masterpiece level and it would be nice if the Unwound Future does the same for this franchise.