Review: Professor Layton and the Curious Village

I’ve never been too good at multi-tasking. I’m a guy — those skills just don't come naturally to me. Listening to the radio while reading the paper is as hectic as it gets for me, but Professor Layton’s inaugural DS outing has shown that such skills can actually prove to be quite useful.

Here's the deal: The Professor has been invited to solve a local inheritance dispute. With his trusty sidekick Luke in tow, Professor Layton must solve assorted puzzles to unravel the mystery of the Golden Apple—a treasure that will decide the fate of the late Augustus Reinhold’s estate. The Curious Village in question is none other than St. Mystere, a rural community with all the quirks of French arthouse film Belleville Rendezvous, supported by a cast of misfits drawn with all the life of a Studio Ghibli animation.

The story sections play a lot like the point-and-click adventures of Broken Sword. Using the stylus to poke around every nook and cranny can turn up new leads and let you converse with your fellow townsfolk. Annoyingly, the challenges have little correlation to the story, but the game cleverly gets round that fact by constantly mocking the village’s relentless puzzle obsession. In saying that, the majority of their brainteasers are merely interludes to the story, which is rather gripping by DS standards. The final twist in the plot is one of those rare "no way!!" moments in video gaming—well worth the preceding hours of frustration.

Each puzzle earns you a number of 'picarats', a varying currency related to each question’s difficulty. One minute you may be rearranging a matchstick picture, the next shepherding wolves and chicks across a stream. After completing each of the 130 puzzles associated with the main game, you can revisit them in the handy puzzle index.

There’s a heap of side-quests too, like furnishing your rooms at the Inn and collecting gizmos to build a robot dog for sniffing out handy 'hint coins' to help you if you get stuck. You can even download a weekly puzzle from Nintendo if you don’t think your brain has been punished enough. Sadly, by the time you’ve seen all that The Curious Village has to offer, your brain will be so sharp you’ll easily recall most of the solutions on an immediate second play. The game even lets you complete puzzles you’ve missed along the way, so 100% completion is entirely likely the first time round.

The good news is that The Curious Village is only the first of a trilogy we’ll be getting over the coming year. If you’re fed up of Dr. Kawashima’s smug mug and need a thought-provoking game that demands a little more of you, even if only for a short time, this has to be it. Just be prepared to chew your stylus to bits.

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