It's been about two years now since I last played a Layton game. A friend of mine has been asking me to play the prequel trilogy for quite some time now and eventually I just felt like playing it. I'll start by saying that it was a good idea to have let some time pass between playing Unwound Future and this entry.

Last Specter is chronologically the first adventure of Hershel Layton and takes him to the foggy hometown of an old friend, where he's supposed to investigate the rampage of a supernatural being. Together with his new assistant and the mayor's son, the team encounters eccentric figures like the mysterious hooded Black Raven and a girl who's suspected to be a witch, dooming everyone who comes close to her.

As in the other Layton games, the gameplay consists of point-and-click investigations and puzzle-solving. The puzzle quality in this entry is solid and the difficulty is fine. In case you can't find a solution, Last Specter practically showers you with hint coins. I had about 130 left at the end of the game, so don't feel bad about using them! I'm pretty sure the original trilogy didn't hand out such an abundance, but I might be misremembering here. Either way, why is everyone so obsessed with puzzles in this town in the first place?

The narrative itself is intriguing, although rather compact. Game has a lot of "this is a prequel" moments, where you can find a reference to some characters from the original trilogy and even some direct cameos. However, Last Specter doesn't really go much in depth with those and shifts the focus to new characters instead - like Emmy, the professor's assistant. In my opinion she's a welcome addition to the main cast and I'm looking forward to seeing more of her in the next games. Now, the twists are usually a big part of what I'm looking forward to in Layton games. They're usually a big shocker that's near unpredictable and totally alters your way of perceiving those games, but I can't say I had a moment like this in Last Specter. Without giving anything away, after a certain point in the story it's really easy to find out the twist by yourself, so at the part where the game explicitly tells you, it's not much of a surprise anymore. The reveal itself was alright, I just expected more out of a Layton game, especially after seeing what Level-5 did with Unwound Future.

Despite this, Last Specter is another well-rounded entry in the Layton series and now I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of the prequel trilogy.

A gameboy advance fell in my hands as soon as ~ 2005. My uncles brought it from China to Argentina. With it it came Naruto: Ninja Council game cartridge with it's colourful orange sticker. There was only one problem, it was all in japanese. As a kid I learned but EVERY option was for. Even deleting my own save files. But I know this game like the palm of my hands. I remember playing it in primary school so many times before knowing it had an Anime. Naruto shouted his name... but the other characters where:
the blue one, the girl, the masked one, Gaara was the honey one. What a blast.

Played a fair bit of this back at uni with friends as a party game, but recently me and a friend decided to plough through it and get all the bombs done up to section 6.

Keep Talking is quite a unique game, in that it fills a co-op puzzle niche that I've not really seen anything else attempt to fill. Most of the co-op puzzle games I've played have been more like escape-room like experiences, where you piece your collective information together to solve puzzles in a civilized and relatively slow-paced manner. Keep Talking, however, is an absolute whirlwind of activity. None of the puzzles are difficult to solve on their own, and instead 100% of the gameplay is on communication, speed and efficiency.

The breakneck pace you're forced to play at has some upsides and downsides. Especially in the later levels it can take a couple of attempts for both players to get back into the swing of things at the start of a play session. However, the intense nature of the game makes it hard to play for an extended period of time, meaning the actual window of time where both players are at their best can actually be frustratingly small. It also feels like some of the later levels encourage you to "cheat"; we ended up playing so much that it was impossible for the bomb operator not to remember a few simple instructions from the manual, and we quickly got into a routine of the operator finding the password module, reading out the first three dials, and then completing the simon module on their own while the expert works through the password. It can feel oddly unsatisfying when you realise you do just remember some of the rules, as it seems to go against the spirit of the game, but it seems pretty unavoidable.

I think the space Keep Talking occupies most succesfully is as a pick up and put down party game, ideally where the bomb operator hasn't played much of it before, and in this space it shines. It's a fun and hectic experience that no other game i know of can deliver. But there is so much late game content which doesn't fit in this model of play, and it's just a bit confusing to work out what the target audience of the more difficult bombs even is.

An even more absurd, insane, weird successor to Trigger Happy Havoc, a lore nightmare, cringey at times, hilarious at times, but overall one of the best visual novel type games ever made and won't leave you bored for 1 second.
Undeniably an exhausting experience (for me at least) and the enjoyment definitely lies within the journey and not the destination with this title.
For me, this is the best part from this franchise and the wholesome and fun moments somehow negate the insensitive fan service and blatant sex humor.
It is definitely not an experience for everyone, but if you liked THH, this is going to be better.