Professor Layton

I recently tried to explain to a friend about the fox, chicken and the worm.

“It’s a classic puzzle.  You’ve got a fox, a chicken, and a worm on one side of a river.  You can only carry two of them on a boat. If you leave the fox alone with the chicken, it will eat it, and if you leave the chicken alone with the worm, it will eat it.  How can you get all three of them across the river safely?”

My friend, having never played Zork Zero, looked at me as though I were mad.  But now I have my revenge, for I have introduced him to Professor Layton and the Curious Village, which has a variant of this puzzle, and he is completely addicted.

Puzzle games have been a bit outré in the past few years since the PC community recovered from the excesses of the early CD-ROM years.  Perhaps it was a lingering sense of guilt over wasted hours spent playing The 7th Guest.  The typical puzzle in today’s games tends to be a sideshow to the main event and boring to boot.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is all about good puzzles, what are sometimes called “brainteasers”.  Some of them are straightforward, some of them are trick puzzles.  Some are easy, some are hard.  But nearly all of them are interesting, and they don’t talk down to the player.

The eponymous Professor Layton and his apprentice, Luke, visit the village of St. Mystere to assist in a mysterious bequest.  The villagers of St. Mystere spend their days, and nights, trying to solve puzzles.  As Layton unravels the thread of the game’s plot he will also be presented with well over 100 puzzles, of varied difficulties, by the villagers.

The artwork is beautiful: simple lines, and somehow evocative of the animated film The Triplets of Belleville.  The music, likewise, evokes the French countryside, and if it can get a bit repetitive at times, it still enhances the experience.  That being said, I’m a sucker for accordion music.   Your mileage may vary. The inhabitants of the village are by turns awkward, fat, ugly, grotesque-looking, and supercilious, so it looks to me as though the authors actually did carefully survey the inhabitants of small French villages before creating the game.  

Throughout the game you’ll find “hint coins” which can be used to purchase hints on any puzzles.  You’ll also receive different puzzles from the same villagers.  At the end of a given “chapter” of the game, any unsolved puzzles will appear in “Granny Riddleton’s Puzzle Shack”, so there is no way to  permanently miss a puzzle.  It did seem to me that solving a puzzle in Granny’s shack was less satisfying than solving it “on the street,” but that’s entirely a question of mood.

There are also various meta-puzzles along the way that unlock bonus content, and there is extra downloadable content that can be played without impacting the main storyline of the game.

A sequel has already been released in Japan, and work is proceeding on the third game, which I will buy without a second thought.  It’s that good.