I just finished playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village. It took me just under 10 hours, and I found 113 of the 120 puzzles. I’ve enjoyed adventure games for a long time (back to Day of the Tentacle and other Lucas Arts games, as well as the Phoenix Wright series), but this was an excellent experience.
The thing that first caught my eye about the game was the art style. I remember reading that it was influenced by French animation (it may have been another European country). I really enjoyed the character design. The main characters were excellent, and the various townspeople all look very different. Some reminded me of other characters (the Chess lover in the pub looks a little like Jason Fox of Fox Trot; the old woman at the bottom of the tower reminded me a Bugs Bunny cartoon character, I think). The animations you see throughout the game look fantastic. According to Wikipedia there are these games in this series and they are making an animated movie. I would gladly watch the movie, especially if the story is as good as this game.
The story is very well done. I figured out some of the twists a decent bit before they were revealed, and some caught me by surprise. The characters personalities are all charming and they really make you want to root for the main characters (Layton and Luke). It’s paced very well. As the game progresses you are introduced to numerous mysteries in the town, and they all are cleared up pretty quickly at the end of the game. Despite this, I never had the feeling that they just told me a bunch of stuff and then left me to play the game for a while until I “earned” the next piece of story (something the Phoenix Wright games have done to me a few times). It’s all quite well done.
The puzzles work very well. They range from arranging match sticks to chess pieces to algebra word problems. There is a great variety and they are (almost always) well done. There were a few where I didn’t think the instructions I was given were enough to solve the puzzle, but those were few and far between. Considering there are 120 puzzles in the game (plus bonus puzzles, plug puzzles from the Nintendo WiFi connection) that’s a great accomplishment. You are often asked to write letters or numbers in a little box that does handwriting recognition, and it almost always works. They did an excellent job with it.
I meant to buy the game when it came out, but I was busy and put it off until I was recently reminded of it. I’m glad I bought it. Totally worth the $30 I paid at a local store. I really hope they bring the rest of the series to the US (there are already 2 more games in Japan).
