Professor Layton and the Awesome Game

I just finished playing Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village (DS), and despite having taken fewer than 10 hours in total to complete, it’s firmly among the top of the list of my favorite games of all time.

Everything about it is frankly just great. The story, setting and tone are engaging – you play as the Professor and his assistant Luke, invited to a village to investigate the mystery surrounding a very strange inheritance. The game is set in a non-specific time period, and Layton might as well be Sherlock Holmes (he even has a funny tall hat) except that there are cars around.

The music sets a great mood, too – one of my favorite tunes can be heard here (YouTube link).

I even like the way the puzzles are integrated. The characters just dig puzzles and want you to help them solve a few stumpers, for the most part…but perhaps there’s more to this odd habit than meets the eye. At any rate, it’s a change from other puzzle games I love (like the Monkey Island series), where you find yourself “putting different fluids in balloons so you can put them in a mail tube so you can flood a communications room so you can etcetera.” [1]

The puzzles were frequently challenging, often trick questions, and two or three times involved geometry, the answers for which I caved and googled. (Length of a side of a triangle, my foot!) Plus the illustrations are hella cute! [2]

Anyway, I finished the game so quickly because I couldn’t get enough of it, and by the end I was wishing there was more. Luckily while searching YouTube for videos of the cutscenes I found that Layton is part one of a THREE part series (not two as I’d heard before).

I do wish they would make a full length anime film or series out of these characters, though. It could be the new and improved Detective Conan/Case Closed.