Professor Layton and the Last Specter

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:54:00 -0400

The Layton series put itself in an unenviable position with a follow-up to the grandiose Unwound Future, which pushed the world-rending consequences of the series to their breaking point. Last Specter attempts to roll back to a more sustainable franchise template, both by starting a prequel trilogy and by restraining the scope to a small town with minimal personal entanglements for Layton, but in the process the writers lose the self-aware artifice that punctuated the previous entries. The original trilogy each features Layton traversing and overcoming a state of unreality;¹ Last Specter expects both Layton and the player to take the game at face value. Misthallery has its charm, with canals threaded throughout, powered by a reservoir looming over the town, but what you see is what you get. The lack of mass conspiratorial orchestration leaves the new trilogy’s villain looking rather impotent compared to their predecessors, who possessed transformative power over the events Layton witnessed. When Last Specter’s narrative reveals the supposed titular specter – a giant figure that has destroyed swathes of the town – as a hitherto unseen squishy Loch Ness monster only to immediately hedge on its culpability, it inadvertently demonstrates just how lousy this game’s hand of cards is. Instead of bluffing until a flush is laid out at the end, they frantically stack bets on weaker reveals steadily throughout. Perhaps it improves the pace, but the final impact suffers.

Super Mario 3D Land

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Although my initial impression felt like the callback-heavy aesthetic and the linear level design were undercooked, Super Mario 3D Land now reads to me as compact and focused. 3D Mario traditionally struggles with providing proper applications for the nuances of its movement mechanics from second-to-second, which 3D Land solves simply by keeping its platforms tight and giving them dynamic properties. Early levels have more continuous topographies with explorable elements similar to the Galaxy games, but by the halfway point the paradigm shifts to providing momentary safe zones in between obstacle gauntlets. Each gauntlet combines a dynamic platform type with an enemy type by plopping a few clusters down in a wide arrangement to give players flexible routes without allowing them to trivialize the whole thing (as soon as the difficulty curve deems that acceptable, anyway). That’s meaty enough to form a whole game around, and 3D Land pushes that to its absolute limit; even with the project’s smaller scope, they shoved nearly 100 full levels into it!

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Professor Layton and the Last Specter

Super Mario 3D Land