Growing up with a DS, I’d always had a passing interest in the Professor Layton series, but I didn’t get a chance to experience it until I picked up one of the entries for the 3DS. Years later, I wanted to go back to the origin of the series to see what the debut had to offer.

Fundamentally, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a mix between a narrative point-and-click adventure and puzzle game. This game was inspired, in part, by the Phoenix Wright series and this comes through in the moment-to-moment gameplay which consists of navigating the environment to progress the story and solving a variety of logic puzzles along the way. The Curious Village was released when the Brain Age series was becoming a household name and those games probably factored into the puzzle focus in the Layton series.

The Curious Village exudes charm through its atmosphere and gives the game a sense of coziness that pervades the experience. The art direction is a major contributing factor to this and is reminiscent of classic French animation like The Triplets of Belleville. The music perfectly complements the art and is a moody mixture of piano, accordion, and violin. All of the characters are drawn in an exaggerated style, even minor ones, making up for the relative lack of personality that the protagonists (Layton and Luke) are generally pretty flat themselves.

The puzzles themselves are varied and, in general, well constructed. Some are simple riddles, others involve manipulating blocks around constrained areas, and others are just straight up math questions. Sometimes, the hints don’t reveal enough leading to an unsatisfying guessing approach, but genuinely solving a puzzle that characters in the game were moaning about is always fun. There are also some odd minigames that I can’t stop thinking about. Namely, the bizarre tamagotchi-esque sim where you decorate Layton and Luke’s bedrooms in an effort to make them happy.

The major gripes I have with the game have to do with the puzzle solving UI. This game desperately needs a whiteboard feature. Oftentimes, I would find myself pulling out a physical whiteboard to take notes while working on puzzles and this is something that could have easily been implemented with the touch screen on the system. Once you have the solution to a puzzle, inputting the numbers or letters to answer it feels like its own puzzle. Single strokes are recorded as inputs so adding an “E” to your answer is needlessly complicated.

The game’s story is the vehicle that moves you from puzzle to puzzle and, for what it is, I found it to be quite satisfying. Like the gameplay itself, the narrative is a series of puzzles in the form of mysteries that are gradually revealed. The resolution to some of the mysteries feels obvious by the time you reach them, but this is mostly due to appropriate clues being given beforehand. Refreshingly, the character of Flora, who is crucial to the resolution of the story, is actually given some agency of her own rather than being relegated to the damsel in distress as was typical of the time. I don’t want to spoil too much, but the story is quaint, a little sinister, and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

I’m looking forward to seeing what the rest of the DS trilogy has to offer. The Curious Village showcases the charm that the Professor Layton series would be known for. UI gripes aside, any puzzle aficionado or cozy game enjoyer should give this one a shot.

Extremely charming
wonderful music and characters
and a story that was way more in depth then I expected
my complains are the puzzles
while despite the fact it is a puzzle game their over abundance and lack of connection to the story and feel like a slog to get through

Add this one to the pile of DS games with outstanding soundtracks, good lord. Just like Actraiser, that's what drew my attention to Professor Layton a long time ago: its music.

Professor Layton's theme, The Looming Tower, Veil of the Night, Ferris Wheel Park, The Village Awakens, the ending theme... Curious Village has one of the most unique OSTs out there, easily.

That said, I wouldn't actually finish it for real until recently, despite knowing about the series for like, 10 years by now. I sampled the first game at one point and did enjoy it, but didn't push through more than the first couple of hours for whatever reason. Revisiting the Ace Attorney series brought my attention back to it though. "Oh yeah, there's that crossover game, right? I better check out the PL games before going into that, then."

Playing this during breaks in my routine in the past week was really fun! Curious Village is a pretty good mobile/portable game, best experienced in short bursts over time. That is, until the story finally hooks you.

One of Professor Layton's defining traits(aside from its masterful soundtrack, I will not shut up about it) is that it features a story on top of its puzzles. You're not just completing a series of challenges on a list like Picross or something, you're also supposed to piece together the truth behind a mystery taking place in the village. I read somewhere that originally, Level-5 didn't plan on taking this approach at all and were instead going to release a puzzle collection a-la Brain Age, but I'm SO glad they went this route because the story is actually pretty interesting!
I don't know if it was thanks to me playing the game on short bursts or initially paying more attention to the puzzles than the story, but I did not see that twist coming at all. Eventually I put the hints together and immediately went "Holy shit, what?????" and HAD to get to the end in one night. Cut to me at 4am, drifting to sleep to one of the most beautiful ending themes I've ever heard.

The aura that hangs over the game once you realize what's going on is so bittersweet, and it's SO effective. A short and simple story that knew exactly how to aim for my heart strings, helped in no small part by its beautiful, often melancholic soundtrack.

That said, this setup does raise some issues. Once the story caught my attention and had me wanting to see the end, the puzzles felt more like bothersome roadblocks than interesting brainteasers. Thankfully I had already completed most puzzles in the game by that point and the last ones blocking your way to the final room mostly didn't give me trouble, but when they did pose a challenge, I just ended up looking up the answers online instead of racking my brain for an answer like I had done with every other puzzle until then. I'm curious to see how they'll address this balance in future games, if at all.

Oh, right-- the puzzles! I spent all this time talking about other shit, but at the end of the day this is a puzzle game after all. They're good!
130+ short problems that'll have you scratching the side of your head with a stylus for a good, long while. Loved the sliding block and Queen puzzles, and the wordplay ones were my favorites. Picking out little details on what exactly was being asked of me for a solution had me thinking back to testimonies in the Ace Attorney series.

Now, they don't all hit the mark. The "who's lying?" puzzles were a bit samey, and there's a couple of them with pretty bullshit solutions. (The chocolate keyboard one comes to mind)

All in all, I really wish I had played these games earlier. Curious Village is such a good starting point, I'm gonna dive in the next games right after writing this. Considering how much I enjoyed the story here, I can hardly wait to see what lies ahead.

Man, the DS really is goated, isn't it? Ace Attorney, Professor Layton, Etrian Odyssey, Trauma Center; so many great gems on this little guy.

text by Brandon Parker

★★★☆

“A STRANGE AND RARE DESERT PLANT THAT ONLY COMES UP OUT OF THE GROUND EVERY 20 YEARS OR SO, AND SO ALIEN IS ITS SHAPE AND UNIQUE ITS BEAUTY THAT THE SNAKES, LIZARDS, AND OTHER DESERT ANIMALS ALL STOP FIGHTING AND KILLING EACH OTHER OUT THERE, AND THEY ALL CALL A TRUCE JUST FOR THE CHANCE TO GET A GOOD LOOK AND WONDER IF IT'S EDIBLE OR NOT.”

I recently played Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsène Lupin, and let me inform you how excited I got after I had started that game up: real excited. Right as you settle into the game proper, instead of your everyday, commonplace tutorial screen popping up to educate you on the controls for your intial playthrough or whathaveyou, this game’s tutorial just tells you to get a damned notepad and pencil. Being that this is a Sherlock Holmes game, you’ll be playing as Sherlock Holmes, of course, and they won’t be cutting corners to make it easy on your theoretically ignorant selves. Only the beginning of the game, though, lives up to that intial assurance, in my opinion. The rest is the usual adventure game ridiculousness. Oh, well, they tried. Good for them. The main thing is, there’s a part early on where you have to find a certain painting in an art gallery. You have to type in an answer to a question, the question being, “What is depicted in the painting?” After spending half an hour typing in as many ways as I could think of to say, “HMS Victory,” I quit the game to look up a walkthrough and found the answer. It was “boat.” So: Brandon Parker is smarter than Sherlock Holmes. This is a historic fact, now. You can even add it to Wikipedia and reference this review.



Now, I worry about the kids sometimes, and myself. Back in “the fair time,” as I call it, you used to have your King’s Quests or your Monkey Islands, but nowadays, if you want a game that doesn’t involve shooting small nations of foreign men over and over in dull grey and brown environments, you’re stuck with either licensed stuff based off of Pixar movies or boring platformers with stupid animal mascots. And that’s another thing. Current kid movies have the same problem as current adventure games. Compare those beautiful, hand painted Disney movies of old to this lifeless, 3D animated computer stuff. I think a link could be drawn between adventure games and Disney movies. I don’t feel like doing it at the moment, though. Forgive me – I am exaggerating, slightly. There are the Icos and Katamaris and whatnot, but do kids even know about those things? Do those games get commercials, or do kids even watch television anymore? For all I know, these days they come out of the womb with hand cupped to the side of their ear, room for a cellphone to be slid in there, and then it’s straight to 4chan boot camp. We might be lost already.

It’s not that I don’t think they can’t handle the violence, or anything. I’m sure most can, and those that can’t will just end up as republicans, or spree killers, or something. I know I used think, wouldn’t it be great if Inspector Gadget wasn’t a dumbass and had hands that could turn into machine guns, or something useful, at the least? You’re not fooling anybody, there. Kids know that that kind of crap is dumbed down for them. That’s not what I’m asking for, however. It doesn’t have to be dumbed down or made for kids in particular at all. It just doesn’t have to be nonstop violence. I guess that’s what I’m saying. Say there’s a kid who wants to play something other than Halo. He just doesn’t know it yet. I’m sure the peer pressure to play Halo and “pwn bitches” with his peers on Xbox Live is enormous, but let’s say this guy is going to strike out on his own. Good for him. Yet, after trying to make it on his own out the real world, Poor Little Ness finds he has so few options that he ends up taking the weak man’s road of used Spec-Ops games for PSX. And he was such a good, promising young lad. Now doesn’t that break your god-damned heart?

I’m only emphasizing the kids, here, since they don’t call them your formative years because you’re free to completey heck them up however you want and change your mind later. I know I wouldn’t be the man I am today if I didn’t have all these fond memories of walking around all those green environments in old adventure games, back when trees were in games, constructing tools out of pocket lint. And personally, I’m also sick as hell of shooting people myself, anyway. By the time I play MGS4 I think the line will be dangerously blurred between player and character. I already feel like a tired, old veteran, sick of battle and death, now, so I won’t be playing so much as method acting.

I’d simply like to see something that has room for your imagination to get in there. The modern videogame is an alkali desert when it really needs to be something more, uh, fertile. Man didn’t abandon painting when he learned to sculpt. Let’s get some colors in there, some majestic green trees and clear blue skies. The imagination can’t grow in the desert. Anything creative or weird doesn’t have to be an abstract handheld game with a clever game play hook anymore. More Balloon Fight and Kiwi Kraze is what I want, I think. Remember Kiwi Kraze? You were a bird in New Zealand rescuing your bird buddies. I don’t know if anyone would even think to make something like that anymore. If they did, they’d use satellite imagery to recreate New Zealand exactly, or some bullstuff. You can do all sorts of weird stuff in games that’d be a lot harder to pull off in a movie or book. Let’s see some of that.

Back in the Fair Time, a company called Electronic Arts (you might’ve heard of them) didn’t look at those games from Sierra and Lucas Arts and see all the happy childhoods, the greenary, the cherished memories born from those games. No, to people like them, they could and can only see “markets” that need “penetrating.” Every bit as horrible as it sounds. These are the kinds of people that invent their own doublespeak business language to say things without really saying anything. The kind of people that up and buy the NFL when too many people start to buy their competition’s NFL game. Well, back when they were wanting to make adventure games, being incapable of ever creating a Full Throttle or a Gabriel Knight themselves, they merely waved their money around and brought in Sherlock Holmes, who, at the time, was the greatest detective (I’m now the best). They were decent enough adventure games, but poor Sherlock Holmes games. They were also damn ugly and lacking in the use of the color green, though I guess it’s the same for London.

Anyway, someone finally made a good Sherlock Holmes game, and it’s not even a real Sherlock Holmes game. It’s about some dude named Layton. A couple of guys making up their own stuff made a better Sherlock Holmes game than EA did, with the actual Sherlock Holmes. Is there something other than spending money that they can handle doing properly? Yeah, we’re not supposed to hate them anymore, being that they apologized for the murders of Origin, Bullfrog, and all – a standup thing to do, I’ll admit, but I won’t fall for that. I know how these people operate. They’re not like you and me. They don’t have a conscience. They’re machines, programmed to simply want more money. They’ll only show a response to anyone other than themselves if their income is threatened. They look at their invented graphs and formulas and follow them to the letter. When something new and original that doesn’t fit in these formulas does well, it’s a “big suprise” that “exceeds all expectations,” and so they imitate the hell out of it, thinking that’s all there is to it. You know at the end of FernGully: The Last Rainforest, when that machine is possessed by a demon and is going through the forest cutting everything down? EA is that demon possessed machine, and they’re cutting down that forest to make room for a new alkali desert, where, as you know, imagination is unable to grow.





Usually what makes an adventure game a stuff one is that the puzzles are just plain hecking nonsense. And, often, I think that happens because the game is just too damn long. The designers aren’t smart enough come up with enough clever puzzles to fit in the entire game for every situation, so they get desperate, and when they get desperate this leads to madness, which leads to the bizarro moonside logic. All of us here know of the Gabriel Knight Moustache Massacre of ’99. This is something now told to small children as a warning. I even think it’s in the latest edition of Bullfinch’s Mythology, under “Tragedies.” I was there at ground zero. I remember it clearly: I finally had a computer all my own for the first time, and, to celebrate, the two latest entries in my favorite game series’ at time – the games being GK3 and Ultima IX. I tell you, it did something to me, something whose effect still lingers to this day. I’d also like to point out that Ultima IX was diddled with by Electronic Arts, known by their true name, “Hexxus“. Hexxus was voiced by Tim Curry, who also voiced Gabriel Knight in his third game, and is known for sounding like a child molester. I personally believe that when the universe is trying to tell you something, you should listen.

So maybe it’s just too hard to come up with enough sensible puzzles to cover an entire game. The Big Sleep didn’t make complete sense to Raymond Chandler, and he wrote the damn thing. And remember the Holmes story where the guy injected monkey blood or something and started climbing trees? What in the heck was that all about? And what a literal pushover Moriarty was. Holmes was too smart for Doyle’s own good, in my opinion. So you wonder what hope there is for there ever being a great detective game that makes sense. But then you remember something like Full Throttle, a game so good that I actually forget it’s an adventure game, and then you think, maybe everyone else is just lazy. Well, you think too much. Just take it easy. What they’ve done here for Professor Layton is side-step that problem by just getting together a bunch of good puzzles that don’t really have much to do with jack stuff. It’s just a series of puzzles that usually come from some guy coming up and saying, “Have you heard of this one?” But they can get away with it because they’re all good ones. It’s really a puzzle game disguised as an adventure game, and therefore actually ends up being a better Sherlock Holmes simulator game than what any adventure game could ever be. Also, it’s a real nice looking game. It doesn’t look like anything else out there. A cartoon, but more The Little Prince than some anime horsestuff. So that’s pretty good.

I guess Japan has only one videogame magazine, and it’s called Famitsu. If any others exist, I have no knowledge of them. If you’re a hip American, perhaps you know all about this magazine, already. But in an issue, there was an article about Professor Layton, and the title of the article was, “Level 5’s new game’s genre is unknown? New style game to train your brain,” except it said that in Japanese, rather than English. Yeah, it seems that in Japan they see an adventure game and, to them, it is some kind of crazy Brain Training knock-off. Ha, ha, those lovable, crazy Japanese. The closest thing those primitive deviants have for comparison is cartoon sex games and Phoenix Wright, so this is a bold new step for them. I hope it takes off.

Anyway, according to the opening cutscene, Layton and I are under some sort of non-disclosure agreement by the curious village, so I can’t exactly talk in specifics about the events of The Case. Sorry. I’ll just say you missed out. A great time was had by all.

The game that started one of my favorite series is an enjoyable experience, despite having a terrible pace and some "curious" level curve in the last half of the game.
Some puzzles are way too tricky to find, making the completion of the game way longer than It should be (why the heck would I click on that random pixel in that random street to find a puzzle, without any suggestion or interesting point?).
The plot is predictable and it randomly descend into fantasy into the last chapter despite not showing any sign of a fantasy setting before, but that's fine. Those who were looking for a serious plot would be disappointed, but luckily, it wasn't my case.

Loved the soundtrack and the characters.
St. Mystere and its abitants really feel like an european country village, reminds me of the little town where I grew up.

There's something quite charming to the original Professor Layton, knowing it's an adaptation of a long-running series of Japanese brain teasers first and foremost, and all the stuff that would come to define the series (the characters, the adventure mystery plots full of over-the-top moments, etc) exists here purely as a framing device. At the same time, there was such confidence in the game that not only were sequels already in the works, but code functionality was implemented that would only be paid off when the sequel rolled around, like a mini Stop 'n' Swop. None of this confidence feels misplaced; Atama no Taisou makes for a great template, and the characters and world are immediately charming, the latter's bombast offset by Layton's quiet modesty.

This isn't a fair-play mystery, to be sure, which seems a contrast to the general nature of the puzzles being solvable with careful critical thinking. But maybe that's all right? Luke's there to play the Watson, so the player isn't alone when things start going off the wall in the endgame.

For a game i was really looking forward to playing, as my introduction to the series, it ended up pretty underwhelming, feeling like it missed more of a payoff, but still fun.

The brain teasing puzzles are mostly pretty fun, even though some of them are way too similar and some also give me war flashbacks from school. The game attempts to make the puzzles feel rewarding by feeding the player collectibles, such as the painting scraps and gizmos, and also the very flawed scoring system in the form of Picarats. The frustrating part about this is that most of the time the end result for collecting all the stuff and solving the most puzzles possible is very disappointing, even if it makes you feel like it would lead to something. Imagine if in Banjo Kazooie the reward for collecting all Jiggies was 3 extra puzzles and a still image, that's what it feels like.

The plot in particular is this game's biggest disappointment. First, it lacked focus, as it presented many interesting mysteries and characters, only to introduce others on a dim making the narrative a scrambled mess, which wouldn't be an issue if the game was able to untangle the web in a satisfying way, which it didn't even come close. Without spoiling too much, the final stretch is not only anticlimactic it also gives the wildest and most random explanations to the mysteries previously set up in a checklist expository manner, with little to no dramatic punch whatsoever. It honestly made me feel a little betrayed thinking all these plot points would be explained in a cool and clever way like in those classic detective stories, and instead we got...anyway, if you know you know.

Even if the game is just basically a puzzle box with a semi-coherent narrative attached to it, it is carried near solely by the strength of its charm and aesthetics. Narratively, as mentioned before, this game is a lot closer to Zac Power than Agatha Christie, yet the environments, the dialogue, the music and specially the characters evoke a whimsical old British literature feel, with great designs all around and some gorgeous animated cutscenes that are looking crisp in the HD remaster. Walking around town while talking to these weird and funny characters makes the constant barrage of puzzles more palpable and relaxing, while keeping your interest on what's going on in the village.

Overall, it's a decent start to what would become a very big franchise, to which i see a lot of pontential, perhaps these issues are ironed out in the later iterations.

As a sidenote, this is a perfect game for children, teaches basic logic and algebra concepts in a fun and intuitive way, and the plot being this dumb will hardly be a problem for them.

Puzzles! There are a lot of them, ranging from math to sliding blocks. A few of them can be frustrating, like ones with a mountain of text that end up being a trick question, but they are overall very well designed. The difficulty curve is a bit strange though. There are easy puzzles mixed in with difficult ones throughout the whole game, instead of them getting progressively harder.

The way the puzzles are integrated into the story and how they are given out is also very jarring.
"Can I enter the village?" "Sure, solve this puzzle."
"Have you seen this person?" "Maybe, first solve this puzzle."
"Hello, I'm looking fo-" "HEY, SOLVE THIS PUZZLE."

I also wasn't a huge fan of the story and felt the pacing was off. You spend a lot of time just walking back and forth talking to people with little of interest happening to advance the story. It starts picking up towards the end and tries to shake things up with a plot twist but I had figured it out by then and thought there was too much exposition. Thins also tend to happen out of nowhere which is a strange contrast to the logical nature of the puzzles.

The presentation was definitely a stand out. The art and animation are wonderful and combined with the London setting make the game feel very charming.

Even with all its faults it’s still a solid puzzle game and I had fun solving puzzles in short bursts throughout the day.

I can't tell for sure how many times I've played (and completed) this game (series), but it still gets me every time. It puzzles (even though I can solve most of tham at a glance), moves, and immerses me. This is without any doubt my favourite gaming series of all time. Now, let's play the rest!
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Ranked: My All-Time Favourites
Added: Games that (almost) made me cry