"Fun, but disappointingly easy and short"

Let's get one thing out of the way. This is one amazingly presented game. Art style, character designs, animated sequences, voice acting, music.... Everything about this game exudes its unique personality that you don't find often in games. Plus, the story is fun, and the interface is near flawless (my only complaint is that some hidden items require a bit *too* precise of a click with the stylus to reveal -- a truly minor complaint). This is top-notch stuff.

If there is one thing that this point-and-click adventure + brainteaser game let me down, it's the difficulty of the puzzles. They are mostly too easy.

I like puzzles. I like games that depend on logic (like Minesweeper or Picross). But I am not one to go out of my way to FIND puzzles -- i.e., I don't buy puzzle books, and I don't scour puzzle sites to find puzzles to solve. I solve what comes my way. (This is probably the best place to mention that I got this game as a birthday gift.)

And I have to say, I found myself breezing through most of the puzzles. I recognized a good number of puzzles from elsewhere, and a lot of the questions were simple trick questions where all you have to do is discard the superfluous information the question throws at you. Yes, there ARE tough puzzles (some took me more than an hour to figure out), but they are much too few and far in between.

I completed the game -- including finding and solving all 135 puzzles the game has to offer -- in roughly 16 hours with about 160 Hint Coins left. I have read online posts where people claimed to have finished the game in less than 10 hours, and I don't doubt them. (Hint Coins are hidden items in the game that you can use to get hints about a puzzle, one hint for one Hint Coin. Needless to say, I found a lot, and didn't use many. I think I used about 15 Hint Coins total. Surely I would have finished the game sooner if I wasn't so stingy with the coins.)

Also hurting is the fact that once you beat the game, there really is no reason to come back to it. Sure, you can download weekly puzzles over Wifi, but it's just one puzzle per week, and most are "oh that's easy" variety. (Someone at Nintendo or Level-5 should proofread the downloadable puzzles, by the way. One puzzle says "cube" when it clearly means "square.")

All in all, I did have a lot of fun with this game. As I said previously, the presentation of this game really adds a lot of charm to what could have been a boring collection of puzzles. And I really liked the story. It's a shame that most of those puzzles were not very challenging.

Recommended, but don't expect tons of playtime, especially if you consider yourself to be good at logic puzzles.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/27/08

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