Professor Layton and the Curious Village

Screenshots

Notes

Professor Layton and the Subtitle Part 1 is a puzzle game with a much better claim to that genre name than most other "puzzle" games.

The core gameplay is, well, puzzle solving. When I say puzzles, I mean mostly riddles and some touch screen based sliding puzzles and similar. The key is variety and almost all the puzzles are actually unique riddles with only a few variations on a theme. These are well done, with solid explanations (so they are actually possible to get without guessing), a hint system for when you're stuck, and nice interfaces to take notes or play with the puzzle pieces. Answers are generally entered by either circling or touching an answer, or a handwriting recognition system for numbers/letters that works pretty decently.

A few puzzles don't land, which is inevitable really given the number in the game.

You get a score for each puzzle in "Picarats" and picking the wrong answer for a puzzle will reduce your reward when you finally get it right. This is persistent through the whole game so any wrong answer reduces your theoretically maximum score for completeing all puzzles. It's best not to think too hard about this and just play the game.

To get hints in puzzles you need hint coins, which are found by clicking the background in the adventure screens and are a finite supply throughout the whole game. However I found that as long as you're not hitting hints constantly it's not really a problem to get one when you need it.

The actual puzzles are tied together by a light adventure/visual novelly gameplay where you wander around the titular village, talking to people and finding puzzles to solve. There's generally not much "point and click adventure" style puzzle solving to do, instead you just transition to a discrete puzzle when it's time for some gameplay.

There are a few minigames where you find objects as rewards for solving puzzles and slowly get to reassemble a painting/robot/decorate your rooms. These are nice distractions and get completed at different rates as you play the game.

The game has a story which is kind of a quirky mystery that unfolds as you wander around and solve puzzles. It's not the most incredible writing but it keeps the pace up and there is some motivation to see how all the mysteries the game piles on will resolve themselves. The cast of puzzle obssessed weirdos occupying the village are kind of endearing in their way too.

It's also got quite nicely animated cutscenes that match the rest of the game art, although they do look a bit compressed on the DS.

The critical path through the games (in terms of puzzle count) is relatively short, but I did click around and find most of the optional puzzles, because I do enjoy solving them. There are times where the game checks how many puzzles you've solved but I never had a problem with passing those.

Notes on the ending: the deceased baron was a crazy person who should not have been allowed custody of his daughter.

Overall I really like Professor Layton games. They are just nice and relaxing to play. There's not much chance of getting significantly stuck given the built-in hint system, looking up a walkthrough is almost never required. There are a lot of iterations in the challenge list, so it is possible I'll get sick of them by the end (I think my new randomizer which will space them out will help a lot with this though). Also interested to see if they get changed up at all.