I've recently gone back to play all the Layton games again in anticipation to the announcement of the 2025 one.
I had tried playing Curious Village before but never finished it properly as I had some of the later ones and I think this one being the first ever game just made it feel a bit of a less polished experience to go through as a kid, but revisiting it now, I'm very glad I did so.
The story of this game is properly enticing and never drags out or pretends you're stupid by either overly explaining or pretending something obvious isn't happening, that mixed with the story beats and twists being actually very original and unique makes it enjoyable in a way where you're curious what else can take place in this world.
The puzzles however I don't feel quite as excited about, I don't imagine it's easy to come up with 120+ puzzles and make them all bangers, but while this game does start off with a lot of them being either clever logic tricks, or puzzles where you have to catch the "flaw" in how the question is presented to you, towards the last quarter or so of the game, the puzzles can be very hit or miss, with some being outright math equations, move the block puzzles (I do enjoy these, but there's a lot of them), or questions that aren't worded as clearly as they need to be for you to understand what the game's logic is on something, like how you might consider the ground floor of a building to be 1st floor or "Ground" and the one after to be the 1st, which can lead to you getting the wrong answer based off that.
Altogether though, how much I enjoyed cracking the story massively overshines the last stretch of puzzles. As I go forward through the series I do imagine both story writing and puzzle quality to get more clever, all in all, a very good start to a classic series.
I had tried playing Curious Village before but never finished it properly as I had some of the later ones and I think this one being the first ever game just made it feel a bit of a less polished experience to go through as a kid, but revisiting it now, I'm very glad I did so.
The story of this game is properly enticing and never drags out or pretends you're stupid by either overly explaining or pretending something obvious isn't happening, that mixed with the story beats and twists being actually very original and unique makes it enjoyable in a way where you're curious what else can take place in this world.
The puzzles however I don't feel quite as excited about, I don't imagine it's easy to come up with 120+ puzzles and make them all bangers, but while this game does start off with a lot of them being either clever logic tricks, or puzzles where you have to catch the "flaw" in how the question is presented to you, towards the last quarter or so of the game, the puzzles can be very hit or miss, with some being outright math equations, move the block puzzles (I do enjoy these, but there's a lot of them), or questions that aren't worded as clearly as they need to be for you to understand what the game's logic is on something, like how you might consider the ground floor of a building to be 1st floor or "Ground" and the one after to be the 1st, which can lead to you getting the wrong answer based off that.
Altogether though, how much I enjoyed cracking the story massively overshines the last stretch of puzzles. As I go forward through the series I do imagine both story writing and puzzle quality to get more clever, all in all, a very good start to a classic series.