Never Too Old To Play™

Professor Layton and the Curious Village, from independent Japanese game developer Level-5, is hands down one of the best games available for the Nintendo DS and my personal favorite DS – no, make that handheld – game of all time.

The Curious Village came out in February 2007 in Japan and a year later in North America as the first entry in a new series of puzzle games. Players follow the exploits of the eponymous scholar and his young sidekick Luke as they explore St. Mystere, the “curious village” referenced in the title, to try to solve the mystery of the Golden Apple left behind by the late Baron Reinhold in his will as a challenge to find a worthy inheritor for his fortune.

The game is a masterpiece because Level-5 basically did everything right.

The developers started off with a rock solid foundation in choosing to revolve the gameplay around solving brain teaser puzzles, which are very popular outside the realm but not often the focus of video games. This sub-genre of brain stimulating activities is a nice alternative to “block” games like Bejeweled and Tetris or the puzzle solving aspects of games ranging from Legend of Zelda to Resident Evil.

In fact, the type of puzzles you’ll find in The Curious Village are akin to the ones popularized by Games magazine and books dedicated to brain teasers – Professor Layton and Luke spend all their time trying to beat tests of logical deduction, observation and manipulation.

Level-5 chose the perfect gaming platform for this kind of gameplay as the nature of these puzzles are a perfect match for the DS’s touch screen technology. Or maybe it was the other way around, with the advent of the technology inspiring the team to bring this kind of puzzle solving to video gamers.

While the game probably could work with your standard video game controller, using your stylus to circle the correct person in an image, draw the best path through the streets of a town or drag pieces of a sliding puzzle around the screen just makes sense.

Of course, simply offering the gamer a random collection of unrelated mind bending puzzles would result in a rather disconnected, boring presentation so Level-5 wrapped the whole thing in the mystery adventure plot I vaguely summarized above and integrated the puzzles into the story as either challenges to advance the plot or optional “side quests” to help some of the villagers the Professor meets.

This type of presentation works well as the viewer sees the puzzles as obstacles to the Professor’s efforts to solve the mystery rather than as recitations from some printed collection of teasers – the experience is more immersive and seamless.

The visual design of the game is also top notch with Level-5 thankfully avoiding the use of Japanese-style artwork and embracing a more European feel for the characters and environments to go with the setting. The character designs are generally pleasant and the overall palette leans towards brownish autumnal hues, which surprisingly work well, a nice repose from the (sometimes garishly) vibrant and saturated colors and exaggerated details often found in Japanese style cartoon designs.

Especially impressive are the wonderfully animated cutscenes that deliver the most important developments in the game. These are full motion, traditionally animated cartoons, complete with localized voiceovers, that look good enough to pass as clips from a professional quality animated film. In fact, the overwhelming popularity of the franchise in Japan prompted Level-5 to create Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva, a full-length animated feature produced by one of the main producers of the Pokémon movies with plans for another new film each winter.

My only complaint with the cutscenes is that there aren’t enough of them. Most of the cutscenes consist of non-animated images of the characters communicating with each other through dialogue text at the bottom of the screen. I imagine that the infrequency of these clips is due to the amount of space necessary to store such high quality video files – a Nintendo DS game card doesn’t have a whole lot of capacity.

Nevertheless, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a top tier, high quality video game that will challenge players of almost any age (some of the puzzles could prove too challenging for younger gamers) and take them on an intriguing ride through a well-written mystery plot full of twists and surprises.

If you’re anything like me, the action-packed conclusion will just leave you ready and raring to go for the next game in the series. The eighteen months I had to wait for the U.S. release of Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box was one of the hardest video game-related spans of anticipation I ever had to go through, but that’s just because The Curious Village was so very good.

Final score: 5 out of 5

Parent to parent

Parents need not worry about the appropriateness of the content in Professor Layton and the Curious Village. The game is similar to Pixar movies in that the visual design and story are both appealing to adults and accessible to children at the same time. Aside from younger individuals who may find some of the puzzles too daunting, players of almost all ages will have a blast trying to solve the clever brain teasers scattered throughout the game as they unravel the mysteries of St. Mystere. I would recommend this game as assuredly for children as I would for adults.

To get an idea of the type of puzzle solving you’ll experience in the game, try the sample puzzles at the official Professor Layton website.

Experience this for yourself!

• Professor Layton and the Curious Village (DS) (Amazon)