Professor Layton and the Curious Village

The Professor Layton series takes the scaffolding from Japanese adventure games – screen-by-screen navigation while conversing with static characters placed within each area – to contextualize a deep collection of puzzles. Professor Layton and the Curious Village, the first entry, lays groundwork for the following entries without coming off as too raw. The opening sets the tone: Layton and his precocious sidekick Luke must locate St. Mystere, a town holding an heirloom known as the “Golden Apple” that will grant its finder the whole of the late Baron Reinhold’s estate. As they discuss directions, the player must solve a simple map “maze” contextualized by a restriction (the path chosen must only lead to a single town). As they approach the town’s entrance in the thin and stalky Laytonmobile (tall enough for Layton to wear his top hat inside), a person from across the moat surrounding the town explains that he can’t lower the drawbridge without knowing which slot his crank works in. The player must use some basic spatial reasoning to figure out which one of three holes the crank can fit in, knowing that the protrusions on the crank will be visually flipped when inserted into the slot. This is the ostensible formula: progress the narrative until the protagonists run into a conundrum and then solve a puzzle based on the circumstance.

For the most part, however, the conceit functions more like a puzzle collection with fancy menus. While some other puzzles are diegetically relevant, many involve simple clicking around in the environment and letting Layton spout off a tangentially related puzzle, while the townspeople will happily indulge you with plenty more if you’ll talk to them. St. Mystere is a snug, compact locale that keeps the puzzles at the forefront at all times, with objectives or progression never obscured or located outside of a distance of a few rooms. Layton’s presence as a whole in this game fits an Agatha Christie mold: he has no personal relevance to the case and offers little about himself other than his gentlemanly aphorisms. He’s affable enough to give the game character as it meanders, but the central plot and its 10+ hour pace suffer from it. A murder occurs relatively quickly after his appearance, and while he’s putting the pieces of the many mysteries together in his head, there’s no transparency into his process, and the rest of the cast is quick to shoo him off to go strategically bumble into new clues. As the game tightens up and begins its ending puzzle gauntlet, Layton conjures up a truly wild explanation for all of the mysteries in a single go. The shock of the endgame twist makes Layton’s exposition dump less jarring and more like a riddle within itself; it turns your brain inside-out and briefly rethink the rest of the game as you bounce between the final few puzzles. Perhaps more importantly, the recontextualization of the rest of the game’s events does well to obscure the lack of momentum during that long middle stretch.

The aforementioned crank puzzle from the start of the game. To keep the puzzle intro-level, it gives three potential solutions off the bat to keep players from getting stuck. Later puzzles remove the multiple choice component in order to prevent easy brute forcing. [src]

What those opening puzzles indicate more clearly are the kinds of puzzles you’ll encounter: mazes and other spatial thinking tests abound. The mazes, which abstractly can be solved just by tracing without reasoning, benefit from having rules that reintroduce the reasoning component, and other spatial tests attempt to muddy the playing field enough that you’ll have to logically or mathematically work through the premise without trying every permutation. The best of these involve cutting uneven materials to achieve square shapes or tying ropes across pinboards; these have enough depth that exhausting the solution space is more tedious than finding a heuristic or following subtle clues left by the designers. Where these become a bit tiresome is with numerous puzzles where one must move a ball or car or other object to another side of a playfield filled with sliding blocks (although these are still better than the rare occasions the game lapses into traditional sliding panel puzzles). For some recurring puzzles, such as matchstick puzzles that require moving certain numbers of matchsticks from a starting configuration to achieve a new visual reference, the solutions can vary from a proper transformation (for instance, changing a projection of four cubes to three cubes by moving a single match) to a riddle written out in matchsticks where the spatial reasoning seems secondary (for instance, a set of matches that spells OOOD where you add a match to the first to get FOOD).

The other half of the puzzle selection are mainly math and logic puzzles. The former of these tend to relate to the spatial reasoning in terms of geometric calculations, or they’ll require a combinatorics solution checking a given layout of items (such as people around a table) against a set of rules. The latter logic puzzles have the highest highs and lowest lows by comparison. Major staples of the series originate here and hold up well; groups of people where one has lied and you must deduce their identity from a group of statements has a defined pattern for solving it but at least must be reasoned through each and every time. However, some puzzles are obscure or strange enough that they didn’t make the jump to the European release of the game. For example, one puzzle gives a seemingly random set of letters with a gap, with the solution being whatever letter fits in the gap. The letters turn out to be the first letters of each number one through ten, completely out of context and with few suitable hints from the game other than pointing out that there’s ten letters. The European version elects to change this out for a much safer tile maze of numbers, where each square tells you how many squares you must travel on your next move.