Adventuring with the Professor
So I received my copy of Professor Layton from Amazon today, I ordered it last week sometime. Before I picked it up, each new preview then review of the game made me want it more and more. I love good brain teasers, but so much of the DS market has now been saturated with “brain training” BS games that are all pretty much boring after half an hour.
Layton, however, has several hooks that piqued my interest and dragged me in. First of all, it’s so refreshing to see a new style of art direction, especially from a Japanese studio (Level-5 previously developed Dark Cloud and Rogue Galaxy). It’s got a distinctly European flavor to the animation, architecture, voice acting, etc. The old-school adventure game feel in Layton takes me back to the days of the classic LucasArts games — Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, Full Throttle.
The town of St. Mystere is chock full of residents who just looove them some good old fashioned brain teasers and logic puzzles. Every corner you turn is host to another one of the townsfolk looking to challenge the Professor with some kind of puzzle. There’s a wide-ranging variety of puzzle types to look forward to: spatial comprehension, math, language, semantics, and general logic, the difficulty of which runs from pretty simple to damn near impossible. The best thing about the wealth of puzzles in Layton, though, is how subjective the difficulties are. Some people I’m sure will blow right past the semantics puzzles, while stalling out on anything requiring 3D spatial proficiency. Myself, I love the object orientation puzzles, but can’t stand any word puzzle that involves piddling with semantics and definitions. A little something for everyone.
Tags: ds, level-5, Nintendo, professor layton, puzzle
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