Professor Layton and the Curious Village DS

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is the first installment in the Professor Layton series for the Nintendo DS. The game is a puzzle/adventure one where the player controls the movements of Professor Layton (voiced by Christopher Miller) and his young assistant Luke (voiced by Lani Minella) around the small village of St. Mystere. The Baron Augustus Reinhold has just passed away and left a puzzle in his will. Whoever can find the Golden Apple will be entitled all of Reinhold's lands. There are a total of 135 puzzles and players will have to solve them in order to advance within the story. Solving puzzles will earn you points called picarats but make a wrong guess and the number of picarats earned will decrease. You can also find Hint Coins hidden around the village in order to spend for hints on puzzles. There are a limited number of these coins around so if you use up all your coins beforehand then you're stuck! Puzzles include brain teasers, sliding puzzles, logic puzzles, and many others.

For one thing, I am quite pleased with the graphics in this game. Viewing the cutscenes feel like you're actually watching an animated movie, and the game introduces you to an impressive cutscene as soon as you start the game. The coloring is very nice and reflects a Victorian time period. The art very much reflects an European-style. After the introduction, the makers back down a bit on the presentation though but even still the presentation is great. Everything is still stupendously detailed and the lighting effects are good. The music is also very nice and the instruments used somewhat remind me of going down the river in a gondola in Venice.

The voice actors is okay and I wished that there was more of it. Unfortunately, they only appear in the cutscenes and I wish that they had given voicing to all of the characters, no matter how small their role is in the game. It's a nice way to be lazy and not have to really read the text. I don't like Luke's character though as I find him to be extremely arrogant. He's all "I'm the assistant to the great Professor Layton. Look at me!"

The town of St. Mystere loves puzzles to the extent that you almost can't strike up a conversation without needing to solve a puzzle. You'll have to go through a number of puzzles while playing this game. Some are required to advance the plot while others are optional. Some are "hidden", meaning that you'll have to poke around in your surroundings to find them. The puzzles range in various degrees of difficulty. The more difficult a puzzle is the more picarats you earn. Some puzzles are extremely obvious while others are just planning to make your brain explode. Some need to be calculated while others are just trick questions. In those types of puzzles, often times the answer is simpler than it seems and you can bet that the game is just throwing out a bunch of numbers in order to confuse you.

When you complete a puzzle, you get this short animation of either Professor Layton or Luke telling whether your answer is correct or not. I actually hate this part because it makes me feel very stressed in fear that I answered the puzzle wrong and lost picarats. I play games in order to relax and I don't want to feel stressed like I'm on a game show and there's only one question separating me from a million dollars.

The one thing that I don't like about the game is its method of inputting answers. The game asks you to write down your answer in a grid one letter/number at a time. The system then recognizes what you just wrote and inputs it in the field above. However, you have to write these in only one stroke otherwise the game will misinterpret your answer. This can be especially annoying as often times the writing style is not your usual. Numbers are okay but when it comes to letters, this is absolutely a disaster. I have yet to figure out how to write a lowercase "I" without the game interpreting it as a lowercase "L" before I dot my "I".

As for replay, the game doesn't quite stand up to playing over and over again. Some puzzles will present to you different numbers but most puzzles only have one solution. You can share these puzzles with your friends over the Nintendo WiFi connection but that isn't as fun as playing them in context with the story and adventure.

Overall, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is quite a fun game and a must have for those who enjoy solving puzzles. The European influence in the art is a breath of fresh air from all those games with anime/manga-styled art. The cutscene animations are awesome and the graphics are really nice. You've seen a lot of these puzzles before but many are still very tough. I like how the makers make sure that you know how to control the puzzle elements before letting you start, even giving you an experimentation so that you know what you're doing. My only complaints are the replay appeal as once you've finished the game it seems silly to replay the one-answer puzzles, and the method of inputting answers for some puzzles (Either insert a keypad or have a better recognition system but I'm opting for the keypad).