Professor Layton and the Curious Village

"Solve this puzzle for me before you do anything else!"

Do you like puzzles? Do you like puzzles sooooo much that you want a game that throws nothing but random puzzles at you? WELL GOOD NEWS! That's EXACTLY what this game is!

I was excited for this game. It looked like a fun puzzler with an interesting story. Well, I was kinda wrong. The story is actually quite interesting. "Solve the mystery of the golden apple!" It kinda sounded like Touch Detectives, or Phoenix Wright. Well here's the problem: you never actually get to the story. I would LIKE to solve the big mystery, but I can't because I have to do about a million random puzzles first. Every single person in this game will give you puzzles to solve before you can advance the plot an inch. Every. Single. Person. And that's not even the worst part. There are times when you think "that's an interesting looking so-and-so, let's see what it does!" Well what it does is it gives you a god damn puzzle. OH BOY! ANOTHER PUZZLE!
I would have liked the puzzles if they worked into the actual story line, but they don't. Very few of the puzzles have anything to do with the story. Most of the time, they're puzzles you've seen before, and have no bearing in the story line. Better yet, sometimes you get a MATH puzzle! Oh BOY!

On the plus side, (what little there is of the plus side) this game looks and sounds very nice. The character designs are nice an inventive, and they remind my of a Saturday morning cartoon mixed with an anime. St. Mystere is a somewhat creepy looking place, and the art style really shows that quite well. The music is very well done, and surprisingly good for a DS game. There background music of St. Mystere is quite nice, and you really don't get tired of hearing it. There is also voice acting! And not just a little, there's quite a lot of it. And it's actually really good! You wouldn't expect the sound of a DS game to be this good!

The good:
Great visuals, fun art style.
Great music, good voice acting.
Fully animated, crisp cut-scenes.

The bad:
Shallow gameplay.
Nothing but endless puzzles that you can find in any puzzle book.
Slow moving story.

Bottom line:
This game is saved (somewhat) by its visuals and sound, but no amount of visuals can make a completely un-inventive game great.
Stay away from this game unless you LOVE puzzles, and wish more games would be nothing but puzzles.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 03/05/08

Game Release: Professor Layton and the Curious Village (US, 02/10/08)