Making a Layton game but on the iPhone should've been a slam dunk, however they needed to do more than just slap a 3DS game onto the phone. Cutscenes makes sense on a 3DS, but on a phone? You don't want those! Especially not unskippable ones! There's also lots of text, big environments you have to navigate to find puzzles (which are just okay by the way) and, against all reason, a manual save system. The game misunderstands the platform it finds itself on so badly it's just sad. What a waste!

It's incredible how satisfying this game is despite how all you're doing is touching to contract some doodads and releasing to release them. Through this simple action and a simple physics system the game create a variety of simple set ups where you can look at the mechanisms at play, figure out what you need to do with them and then apply finesse. Despite the simplicity of this, it always feels good to nail the timing in each level whether by skill or by luck. It's very rewarding idle fun.

While throwing punches with motion controls works really well and it's full of personality, this game is super light on content. There's online versus, an arcade mode, a few minigames and that's it. It tries to alleviate this by having a variety of boxing glove options to equip, but it's not enough to provide real depth and instead just waters down any differences characters have out of the box. While dodging and returning bevies of punches is fun, it's both physically and metaphorically tiring.