This review contains spoilers
i run into a unique problem with professor layton games. it would unquestionably be to the game's detriment to be just a collection of puzzles with no characters or plot. when was the last time someone sang the praises of those generic puzzle collection games that you can find on steam?
at the same time, we're on game 5 and consistently every layton game's plot has failed to be even passably sensible to me. often times the mysteries have convoluted answers (oh everyone levitated away because they hid balloons that lifted them and we didn't see these balloons that we are already assuming could've lifted the victims in question because of the neon sky. sure.) or they're just genuinely unsolvable from the audience perspective (how were you supposed to know that layton found angela offscreen and therefore the angela that was with us was descole? you weren't). i try to be forgiving to these games but we're this far in and we're still doing asspulls and nonsensical plot resolutions? i think unwound future is the only game in this series that resonated with me on any level and that was mostly because it wasn't caught up in story beats or minutiae of the mystery and instead went all in on making the character struggles compelling. i didn't care who don paolo was until unwound future, then i felt sorta bad for him. the writing wasn't astounding, but at least i remember it. the plot still fell apart in the final hour, but i still think about that final cutscene of layton saying goodbye to his dead lover and feel something. these are the moments i wish layton games provided more of!
unfortunately, miracle mask doesn't even really give us that, either. there's maybe one moment that i could say works (layton's immediate reaction to randall's "death"), but it's completely sunken by the fact that randall being the masked gentleman is such a flagrantly obvious twist that i question if it was even meant to be a reveal. there is literally no established character who would've had the mask that randall had when he "died" so by process of elimination, the plot twist has to be "randall didn't die and instead is stirring shit as the masked gentleman because he feels betrayed. . . for some reason?". while we're on the subject of randall, i do not find the dude sympathetic and question the game's urge to give him redemption. he's a rich kid who does a very reckless thing despite several people warning him not to do it, he suffers consequences from it, and then gets mad because randall thinks he should be above consequences. in randall's world, angela was just supposed to wait for him forever despite all evidence suggesting he was dead. it's incel behavior. and sure, let's all forgive randall for trying to kill hundreds if not thousands of people in this game's version of las vegas and causing who knows how much structural damage and injuring an untold amount of people. we're given time to know randall, and all it does is illustrate that he is a foolish, immature, and entitled brat. the game rooted the big emotional moments on this character and the whole time i was playing the game, i was just going "i'm supposed to find this guy compelling and sympathetic?" lmfao. also, it sucks huge shit that randall in the flashbacks has extremely fair and pale skin but then when he's the Villain he suddenly has dark skin. like that is incredibly shitty.
beyond that, the game itself is fine. again, it'd be lesser without the presentation, but the gameplay does save this from being something i just outright dislike. the side-games are the best so far in the series for me, and i enjoyed all of them (even if the rabbit theatre one desperately needed some way to speed up repeat attempts). i don't feel quite comfortable saying if this game has the best batch of puzzles yet, but i will say that it has the least amount of outright bad ones. there's still awful ones, mind you (the floor panel mummies one is dreadful, and the chessboard ones were nightmareish for me), but overall it was a solid effort. and visually, i think this game transitions the series from 2D to 3D effortlessly. i wouldn't say the game is eye candy or anything, but i do feel as though monte d'or is a highlight of the series in creativity, design, and execution.
i wonder if professor layton just isn't a series for me. i've tried very hard to force myself to like these games, but the story elements are garbage and bring the whole experience down. it's like i hit a glass ceiling where i just cannot give a fuck about mysteries or any foreshadowing in this game because half the time i can guess the reveal and the other half of the time it's just poor writing. i don't need these games to give me agatha christie, but i do wish they'd stop trying. bank on the characters, they're the only parts of these games that stick with me. i struggle to find what people really adore about these games. at best, they're cute little puzzle games that sometimes have a funny line or good character moment, and at worst, they're wastes of time. i've probably said this before in another review for the series, but these are games i would struggle to feel strongly about.
i don't think i could see myself ever hating a professor layton game, but, by that same token, i couldn't see myself ever loving one either. they're the equivalent of eating unsalted peanuts. unseasoned chicken. room temperature water. could be so much better, but it's passable.
at the same time, we're on game 5 and consistently every layton game's plot has failed to be even passably sensible to me. often times the mysteries have convoluted answers (oh everyone levitated away because they hid balloons that lifted them and we didn't see these balloons that we are already assuming could've lifted the victims in question because of the neon sky. sure.) or they're just genuinely unsolvable from the audience perspective (how were you supposed to know that layton found angela offscreen and therefore the angela that was with us was descole? you weren't). i try to be forgiving to these games but we're this far in and we're still doing asspulls and nonsensical plot resolutions? i think unwound future is the only game in this series that resonated with me on any level and that was mostly because it wasn't caught up in story beats or minutiae of the mystery and instead went all in on making the character struggles compelling. i didn't care who don paolo was until unwound future, then i felt sorta bad for him. the writing wasn't astounding, but at least i remember it. the plot still fell apart in the final hour, but i still think about that final cutscene of layton saying goodbye to his dead lover and feel something. these are the moments i wish layton games provided more of!
unfortunately, miracle mask doesn't even really give us that, either. there's maybe one moment that i could say works (layton's immediate reaction to randall's "death"), but it's completely sunken by the fact that randall being the masked gentleman is such a flagrantly obvious twist that i question if it was even meant to be a reveal. there is literally no established character who would've had the mask that randall had when he "died" so by process of elimination, the plot twist has to be "randall didn't die and instead is stirring shit as the masked gentleman because he feels betrayed. . . for some reason?". while we're on the subject of randall, i do not find the dude sympathetic and question the game's urge to give him redemption. he's a rich kid who does a very reckless thing despite several people warning him not to do it, he suffers consequences from it, and then gets mad because randall thinks he should be above consequences. in randall's world, angela was just supposed to wait for him forever despite all evidence suggesting he was dead. it's incel behavior. and sure, let's all forgive randall for trying to kill hundreds if not thousands of people in this game's version of las vegas and causing who knows how much structural damage and injuring an untold amount of people. we're given time to know randall, and all it does is illustrate that he is a foolish, immature, and entitled brat. the game rooted the big emotional moments on this character and the whole time i was playing the game, i was just going "i'm supposed to find this guy compelling and sympathetic?" lmfao. also, it sucks huge shit that randall in the flashbacks has extremely fair and pale skin but then when he's the Villain he suddenly has dark skin. like that is incredibly shitty.
beyond that, the game itself is fine. again, it'd be lesser without the presentation, but the gameplay does save this from being something i just outright dislike. the side-games are the best so far in the series for me, and i enjoyed all of them (even if the rabbit theatre one desperately needed some way to speed up repeat attempts). i don't feel quite comfortable saying if this game has the best batch of puzzles yet, but i will say that it has the least amount of outright bad ones. there's still awful ones, mind you (the floor panel mummies one is dreadful, and the chessboard ones were nightmareish for me), but overall it was a solid effort. and visually, i think this game transitions the series from 2D to 3D effortlessly. i wouldn't say the game is eye candy or anything, but i do feel as though monte d'or is a highlight of the series in creativity, design, and execution.
i wonder if professor layton just isn't a series for me. i've tried very hard to force myself to like these games, but the story elements are garbage and bring the whole experience down. it's like i hit a glass ceiling where i just cannot give a fuck about mysteries or any foreshadowing in this game because half the time i can guess the reveal and the other half of the time it's just poor writing. i don't need these games to give me agatha christie, but i do wish they'd stop trying. bank on the characters, they're the only parts of these games that stick with me. i struggle to find what people really adore about these games. at best, they're cute little puzzle games that sometimes have a funny line or good character moment, and at worst, they're wastes of time. i've probably said this before in another review for the series, but these are games i would struggle to feel strongly about.
i don't think i could see myself ever hating a professor layton game, but, by that same token, i couldn't see myself ever loving one either. they're the equivalent of eating unsalted peanuts. unseasoned chicken. room temperature water. could be so much better, but it's passable.
assumption
2 years ago
My enduring fondness for the Layton games comes from a recognition of where they lie in the cultural terrain. As a child I could already see their derivations from detective fiction; an idea of adventure-fantasy in which they sculpted; a point-of-view dynamic they reproduced. Their sentimentalism appealed to me in the well-recounted way also, and the continuity of "world-view" had its bearing. What persists of those feelings comes chiefly from the former set; what seems to hold sway in parochial-critical consensus is a particular account of the latter. Without too great a departure I think I can invoke a narrative of brand-line struggle as the dominant thought among nostalgics, and some sort of scales of affect for those brave enough to broaden the comparison to the "width" of popular culture. I'm not convinced Layton has any purchase on these grounds, even less so that the series ought to be lauded on them.
The Layton games are, initially quite bold-facedly, a gesture at children's literature and the fairy story; they chime too with the symbolists and the Jewish majse. Yes, they carry a sensibility of active interventionism by then well franchised, but one which belies their debt, not to genre and puerility, but to the generality of the folk idiom; they capture the figure of an archetype, but not so contemporary as the detective, closer the 18th century philosophe; likewise the tension of the reader, in the necessarily incomplete analogue of the companion, drawn as factotum cum protégé. It remains perverse to me that so many see any particular element of the central revelation at the climax of that very first game as a genre intrusion, rather than the fulfilment of a promise the story makes as early as its first "fetch quest" to be a petit fantastique.
What the series does offer is an historic perspective, a sort of generalised literary Europeanism that takes and leaves from a breadth of currents, tracing lines from mythic forms to established aesthetic moments, dense with textures and motifs. It follows a succession of images of the city: of logopolis, then necropolis, later metropolis, through cosmopolitanism; the characters are their character. Their stylings are often explicit in their emulation; they stand and fall on their content. I think they sometimes engage with a complex account in a profound sort of way, properly modern or even modernist; other times their genre-play is only that, a feeble and self-satisfied pastiche.
The alternative approach, where one lines up heroes and villains, victories and tragedies, ranking them like-for-like, laughing about "absurd plot twists" and childish visions of inner life but "loving it anyway" never made much sense to me. I liked my reasoning heroes and the power of their emblems to put stories in sequence, but the folding of narratives into those characters seemed modally inverted: the interloper's dramatic power now dictated the hidden world they discovered, as if the whole escapade was just an obstacle for them to avoid. The potency of later games' melodrama dissipated under scrutiny; the elegance of earlier instalments' resolutions held.
Of course, the common defense of Miracle Mask is that it is rife with homoeroticism; my sympathy for this idea is limited.