Professor Layton and the Unwound Future

The initial bombast of Unwound Future immediately sets it apart from its two predecessors: a public showing of a time machine goes awry and explodes, taking the prime minister with it as Professor Layton and his soon-to-be emigrating companion Luke observe in horror. A letter from Luke dated 10 years in the future soon arrives at Layton’s office, leading him to a second, functional time machine contained in an antique clock store. Once he and Luke arrive in the future, they find that the future Professor Layton has started an organized crime ring out of London’s Chinatown and taken over the city, with his goons skulking about doling out puzzles to unsuspecting citizens. There’s a puzzle around here where you build a gun that shoots poker chips in the middle of a casino shootout. The escalation continues: Layton’s nemesis (and in a Venture Bros.-esque twist, college classmate) Don Paolo returns, a giant mobile fortress begins destroying London, Layton searches for his up-to-now unseen former lover, and so on.

All of this takes place in a completely contiguous rendering of both future and present London, for once centering the plot around places near and dear to the hearts of Layton and Luke. Bumbling Inspector Chelmey from Scotland Yard (his presence ticks the “useless authority figure constantly outwitted by the protagonist” checkbox) not only returns but also lets Layton into his headquarters to look up old cases; likewise, a detour around the same time lets Layton retreat back to his university office and converse with his colleagues. The decision to make this story more personal to the protagonists gives the story actual stakes in a way that the first two couldn’t achieve and helps propel the story with more consistent setpieces compared to the more constrained original entries. It also unfortunately reveals that Layton’s irresistible gentlemanly charm has his female students swooning and begging him for one-on-one time in his office.

In one of the more touching scenes, Luke briefly has a breakdown about his impending travel overseas as his family moves abroad. The moment goes unfortunately unexplored until it’s resolved when Luke writes to Layton in an epilogue some weeks on, but the construction of this statue and its strange parallel to Layton becomes apparent subtextually as you learn more about the person who constructed it. It’s a rare moment of subtle character building in a game mostly concerned with caving the player’s skull in with plot beats. [src]

While these moments are invigorating for an otherwise formulaic franchise, they remain mere moments in a game that leans heavily on the meandering of the first two entries, only now with the nagging feeling that the leisurely pace is unwarranted. The beginning premise becomes more clearly built on bluffs at the end with the traditional Layton cranial-contorting twist, and thus the middle must fill around five hours of thumb twiddling and multiple spots for a bite to eat. It’s still chock-full of puzzles and quirky NPCs per usual, but the focus on the protagonists and their pasts ends up sidelining the NPCs further, and they functionally bow out as the game begins mass dumping twists in the final few hours. These twists have the unfortunate burden of raising the intrigue on an already searing-hot intro, and in their totality they suck the air out of what should be the most intense moments of the game, piling on top of each other to the point that the sizzle dampens.

Exacerbating this, the Layton writers lack the flair to construct characters beyond their initial traits. Diabolical Box builds its thematic core around its locales, juxtaposing the wistful grace of Dropstone with the sickly bounce of Folsense. The deeper Layton and Luke go into the town’s mine, the more it lashes out, exposing a mania that detaches its effervescent population from reality. Meanwhile Unwound Future puts the multiple antagonists directly against Layton and his revolving door of companions, tagging in new twists and characters as it repeatedly runs out of gas on each character’s motivations. Not only does it lack the subtext of its predecessors, but it ends up bogging down the final chapters in a linear puzzle gauntlet broken up by gasps of plot development.

In this puzzle, one must rearrange the five books shown into this shelf. A simple task if not for multiple restrictions on which books can touch other books. To find the solution, one must consider just how the orientation of the books may be manipulated in order to ensure everything fits in correctly, even if it looks a bit unorthodox. [src]

Meanwhile, the puzzles of Unwound Future settle into the safe rut of spatial tests: especially mazes and shape manipulation. Initially the game makes a point to play with more mathematically minded puzzles related to time, whether its the passage thereof or manipulation of clocks (arguably spatial as well), but by the middle of the game it lapses into more mundane angles. To be sure, the spatial puzzle set is strong, with virtually none of the simplistic mazes that plagued Diabolical Box and a careful effort to avoid overloading on “move a ball/box from one spot to another by moving blocks around” puzzles. Instead, the same smart restrictions that enliven the maze puzzles work for the other spatial puzzles as well, either by weeding out obvious solutions from so-so block manipulation or 2D->3D projection puzzles or by changing the nature of the pieces of the puzzle such that what they initially seem to be distracts from the actual solution. These satisfy, although some more emphasis on the logic and math puzzles would have bolstered these, perhaps. While the latter is strong when it appears (especially in the time puzzles), the former rarely ventures beyond reconciling statements across a group of people by finding a lie or making sure a group of people have unique outfits from a limited wardrobe. It’s an especially glaring omission given that there is an early-game riddle battle that seems to provide a new novelty for the game, only for it to functionally disappear for the rest of the runtime.

The item minigames from the prior titles also return here. The hamster companion exercises from Diabolical Box are replaced by parrot deliveries here, where Luke’s new pet must deliver items to customers under a time limit by bouncing on ropes suspended by the player. The physics are nuanced, to put it kindly, with slopes careening the poor parrot into walls or off the map frequently. With a limited, pre-supplied number of pegs for each minigame, the open-ended solutions of the hamster minigame are replaced with brute-forcing the correct rope layout here. Likewise, a new RC car minigame inherits the top-down grid traversal of the hamster minigame but replaces it with a series of maps with mandatory collectables and limited placeable tiles that change the direction of the car. Given how many of these I solved without expending all of my tiles, these seem a bit more open-ended than the parrot minigames, and the evaporation of each tile upon contact with the car makes planning loops more interesting than a corresponding “make a path that never touches itself” kind of puzzle. The last minigame deals with placing stickers in a picture book; the context clues for which stickers go where adds some obfuscation, but the infrequent disbursement of the stickers and the woeful brevity of its “gameplay” when placing one sticker at a time make this minigame easily the weakest of the bunch.