Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

Diabolical Box instantly has a better sense of scale than the first, with its initial mystery having more personal stakes for Layton and its starting train ride setpiece giving way to multiple locales compared to Curious Village’s single tight area. You’re given much more room to stretch your legs, and the second half of the game alone feels like it’s the same size as the entirety of St. Mystere. The multiple mysteries in this one also expand beyond the big endgame twist, and more care has been taken to drop breadcrumbs of intrigue throughout the adventure rather than meandering through as in Curious Village. At the same time, the larger cast of characters and tragic lover’s bond at the heart of the narrative makes the lack of attention paid to their actual characterization more noticeable. An examination of the folly of a rich family mining the earth and bringing ruin on their workers becomes didactic quickly when it’s conveyed entirely through history lessons and Layton’s personal observations, and the writers' preoccupation with preserving the shock of the primary mystery keeps the actual humans at the core of the conflict from expressing themselves until the final ten minutes.

While Curious Village tried its hand at a couple diegetic puzzles, Diabolical Box integrates them more regularly, no doubt due to the expanded exploration. In particular, making the final puzzle the titular box itself sells the Professor’s role in the central mystery much more organically than the puzzle tower that caps off Curious Village (where the final puzzle is… about drawing squares on a pinboard). Much like the European version of its predecessor, Diabolical Box also dispenses with many of conceptual puzzles out of the gate, leaning more heavily on the spatial, logic, and math puzzles. The train focus for the first half in particular gives a great opportunity for testing the player’s ability to shuffle train cars on limited tracks for a handful of puzzles. However, the mazes (and their ilk) tend to get overplayed during puzzles directly on the critical path, most likely because they are simple to brute force and thus will not provide a serious impediment to advancing the story. Even then, the manner in which these are displayed often varies from puzzle to puzzle, whether it’s finding a correct wire or solving a grid-based lock disabled by tracing a particular path.

Statchen here is rather blunt with exactly what he wants in his tea. Others are much less forthcoming, and with 26 separate people to serve and little guide to the few valid recipes from hundreds of ingredient combinations, this minigame makes a poor case for engaging with it outside of the aromatic descriptions of the blends themselves. [src]

Although I neglected to play them in Curious Village, completing certain puzzles in each Layton game will provide the main duo with items that go towards various minigames. These often result in ways to either find extra puzzles or “hint coins” throughout the world (these can be exchanged for up to three hints on each puzzle). My disinterest in the Curious Village set is that two of them were functionally jigsaw puzzles, while the last was a room organization exercise that didn’t evolve piece-by-piece; it was worth just waiting until one had collected a full set of the furniture pieces in the game before attempting to lay out Layton and Luke’s rooms. Two of the minigames in Diabolical Box fall into these traps as well: the quest to build Gizmo in Curious Village by placing scraps inside of a frame has been replaced with a similar task to build a camera. Finishing its construction and taking pictures with it in various parts of the town opens up a “mark the differences” puzzle, which are about as enjoyable as you might expect; finishing these will yield a new puzzle. The new tea set game is even more tedious: the player can either attempt to brute force each of the different recipes from ingredients rewarded during puzzles, or they can attempt decipher comments on taste/texture/etc. from fainting NPCs requesting a pick-me-up. The seemingly random way each NPC switches between being in the mood for tea or not deters repeat attempts.

The sole bright spot in the minigame lineup involves getting a portly hamster back into shape through an open-ended grid traversal puzzle, where items received throughout the game can lure the hamster to move through more tiles or bestow alternative effects such as jumping or turning around. The player can arrange the items in any order they want, which gives multiple solutions towards getting the hamster to move enough to lose weight. Smarter solutions can finish quite a while before all of the ingredients have been recovered, which points both towards the puzzle being on the easier end while also having a solid margin for optimization.