Professor Layton and the Curious Village (Nintendo DS)

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==What is Professor Leyton’s Curious Village?==

It’s like no game I’ve played before on the Nintendo DS, I think we’ve had our DS now for about three years, I’ve got 0 games on it, and the one game I actually did enjoy (Guitar Hero) hurt me too much to keep playing on it over and over again.

Professor Leyton’s Curious Village requires you to put your puzzle solving prowess to the test and you begin to play ...
...crack the case. You play Professor Hershel Layton, a famous Professor who has been assigned to solve a mystery that has long played the good people of St. Mystere. You arrive in the village and have to solve the mystery and realise that all of the locals have one thing in common, their obsession with puzzles.

== Puzzles ==

The puzzles are just fantastic, each one is worth different money values and they are gauged in ... more

I am not a huge ‘video game’ buff, I buy odd ones every now and then, but they usually turn out to be crap or I play on them for a week and get bored of them. Our local blockbusters have just finally brought in some new rentals; you can now rent Nintendo DS or Wii games, and out of a small number of games to choose from my mum and sister chose this game.

We only had a week to play on it, and it wasn’t until about the 5th day that I actually picked up our DS and actually started my own game and was hooked from then on. Just before we took it back to the shop, I looked on the stats of my game and I had played it for 6 hours overall in three days. Yes, I know, that’s showing what a big bum I am now college has finished.

What is Professor Leyton’s Curious Village?

It’s like no game I’ve played before on the Nintendo DS, I think we’ve had our DS now for about three years, I’ve got 0 games on it, and the one game I actually did enjoy (Guitar Hero) hurt me too much to keep playing on it over and over again.

Professor Leyton’s Curious Village requires you to put your puzzle solving prowess to the test and you begin to play detective in this brilliant adventure. Along the way, you will be required to solve around 130 puzzles to crack the case. You play Professor Hershel Layton, a famous Professor who has been assigned to solve a mystery that has long played the good people of St. Mystere. You arrive in the village and have to solve the mystery and realise that all of the locals have one thing in common, their obsession with puzzles.

Puzzles

The puzzles are just fantastic, each one is worth different money values and they are gauged in terms of difficulty, however each puzzle is different and you can find yourself looking at the puzzle and working it out straight away and feeling quite good about yourself, or having to use three hint coins to even begin to work out how the hell you are supposed to work out the puzzle. There were quite a few that I just could not get my head around, and then some that after about 5/10 minutes on the puzzle everything just begins to fall into place.

The puzzles are fantastically well thought out and are created brilliantly. You do things from dividing 7 pigs with three ropes, bring all of the animals across the river, sliding block puzzles and much, much more. You do find that a lot of these puzzles are using things that you may have learnt when you were a child, basic maths and algebra, basic skills that you may have thought that you’ve forgotten.

Sometimes you can get yourself worked into a tizz about a puzzle because you’re over thinking it, these puzzles generally make sense after you’ve done them, you have to read the problem very carefully to get the answer a lot of the time.

Hint Coins

I mentioned ‘Hint Coins’ in my paragraph above and some of you may be going what the hell are hint coins? These things are hidden throughout the village, seriously every time you get to a new section, just pick up your stylus and just hit everything on the scene that you’re on, from candles to chairs to lights, there are hints coins hidden everywhere and they can help you loads when you are working out your puzzles.

When you are doing the puzzles and if you get stuck, you can use the hint coins to get ‘hints’ about the game. You can only get 3 hints per puzzle but really if you are going to use the hints to help you, the first one is a bit pointless really, it pretty much will always tell you to just read the specification carefully. It’s not really until the third and final hint that it makes a lot of sense.

Is it any good?

I think you already know my answer to this, this is probably the best game I have played on the DS so far, it didn’t really have many downsides at all. The story may not be believable, but you play Professor Layton and his young assistant called Luke and you are presented with new puzzles at each turn, some puzzles are just for fun, but other puzzles are necessary to complete so you can get help off some of the locals or solve parts of the case.

The puzzles are a hell of a lot of fun, even though if you’re not very patient (like myself) then you may find yourself getting quite ansty with some of the puzzles on the game because boy are some of them bloody tough, even when you solve them, they can still annoy the pants off you because they really are so simple when you have solved them.

If you like the odd puzzle, either a word search, crossword or even a Sudoku puzzle then this game is definitely for you. You don’t need a hell of a lot of time to play the game, you can play the game for about 10 minutes each day or something, it’ll take you a lot longer to solve but it doesn’t need to take up too much of your time because it’s very easy to save and start again.

Do you need to be brainy to play?

Hey if I can do it, then anyone can do it. You don’t need to be a brain box to play, you just need to be able to sit down and sit patiently with the puzzles and read the problem over and over, and one way or another it’ll click into place and the good thing about this game, is when you solve a puzzle, especially if it’s a hard one, then you really do feel good afterwards.

I actually think the less of a brain box that you are the more likely that you are going to enjoy this game, I think if you completed the game in 3 hours instead of 12 like most people take then you will feel a little bit cheated, but I don’t think you can complete it in this amount of time unless you are a scientist or you’ve used all of the cheats on the net, that are available.

Game Play

The game play is just fantastic, you pretty much control the game; you tell them where to go next, unless they really want you to go somewhere important, then the game will take you there automatically, you tell the game if you want to solve the puzzles or not and you have to find all of the hint coins etc.

The length of the game play seems to be quite excessive though, I have read that it took someone 22 hours to complete the entire game just once, and then I’ve heard that some people have completed it in about 8/9 hours. It doesn’t seem to allow you to complete it in less time, because you have to do a good number of puzzles to work through the game and get to the end. I was probably only half way through the game before we had to take it back and I was at about 6 hours so it is a long game and you do need a lot of patience.

The game takes full advantage of the capabilities of the DS and they have created a fantastic game, which takes use of all of the graphical capabilities that the DS provides, the characters in the game almost look anime and they really do add a lot of charm to the game.

Negatives

The one thing I found quite difficult with the game, was the fact that they’d tell you to go to the ‘cafe’ but you have to either remember where the cafe is or search for it yourself. I think a lot of time could be saved it they put a arrow to where you need to go or something like that. For me this bugged me slightly, but for most I’m sure it won’t bother you.

Price

Okay, yes in the shops your still paying about £30 or whatever, however as I’m now looking to buy this game off EBay, they seem to be selling for about a tener which is well worth it for this game.

Target Audience

The game is 7+ and I’m sure that some 7 year olds will be able to complete this game in the same amount of time that I would (very unlikely) but it will get your children’s brains working and it may also become a family game as they may need help with some of the puzzles which allows them to spend time with their brothers/sisters or parents and get them to help them with the puzzles.

It is probably aimed at an older audience however, it does require you to work out the puzzles and I know at 7 I would have rather played with my barbies rather than sit on this game using my brain.

Sound

As when I play on the DS it’s usually in the living room whilst my family are watching TV or something like that, I do not have the sound on. I put it on a little bit before I went to bed last night and the sound is pretty good. It adds a lot more mystery to the game which is always good.

Graphics

Good graphics on the Wii or PS2 I expect, however on the DS because it’s on such a small screen, you don’t really seem to care about graphics as much as you would with a Wii game. The graphics in this game beat the Wii Music game on Wii that I reviewed a few weeks ago. They are so intricate and the game has really taken advantage of all graphical capabilities that the DS allows now a days. Well worth the money on the graphics side of things.

Sequel

Apparently there is a sequel to this game coming out soon call Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. I myself will be waiting patiently for it, as this is probably the best game I have found on the DS so far.

Final Opinion

I’m sure you can tell that I really do love this game, I really think it is probably the one game on the DS that is actually worth the money that you pay for it. On Amazon and Play.com you can get quite a bargain and the game is selling for about £18 on those sites, which is brilliant. If you don’t mind second hand games then check out EBay, be careful of ‘overseas’ buyers however, as this game seems to be very popular with them, we have so many problems with Hong Kong sellers that we now make it a rule not to buy from there.

The game is probably one of the most challenging games on the DS, and for me this is what I’m looking for. It is not very often that I find a game which keeps me going back for more and more, I usually get bored after a week or so. With this game I can’t see myself getting bored until after I’ve finished it and then I have heard that there is a lot more things to do even after the game has finished.

If you manage to get this game for under a tener then you really have got yourself a bargain, it is a fantastic game and it really will appeal to a wide portion of people, I think I’ve seen about 5 bad reviews of this game and that was because these people seem to be too ‘brainy’ for the game. Don’t worry about needing patience for the puzzles, I myself have a very small attention span and if you do start to lose patience with the puzzles then don’t hesitate to quit the puzzle and go back to it later on.

A fantastic game which I thoroughly enjoyed and I think a lot of you will as well. It is challenging, but I think every once in a while everyone wants a good challenge.

(C) 2009 Kirsty

 

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