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Great Artwork, Great Puzzles, Great Game.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: March 11, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game is excellent. It's presentation is almost unmatched in the realm of DS games, with great artwork and voice overs, animated segments, quirky characters and great atmospheric music. It feels like watching a Miyazaki movie, or something similar.

The game consists of a series of brain teasers/puzzles separated by exploration segments during which you travel around the town with a simple point and click interface, looking for clues and talking to townsfolk. The townsfolk themselves are the source of the puzzles, and some of these puzzles are quite difficult. The game requires extensive reading, and many puzzles are logic type games, but some require a bit of mathematical knowledge or more advanced and tricky thinking. Nearly all puzzles are unique and therefore it's really hard to describe the variety in the game, but they cover a wide range of familiar and unfamiliar puzzle types, some of which will likely be familiar (Wolf and Sheep crossing the river type puzzles, number games, shapes and line puzzles, time puzzles, word play puzzles etc.).

I've been having a great time with this game, and recommend it to those wanting a great thinking game with way above average production values. It's easy to save the game anywhere and continue, so short play sessions are possible, and you can skip puzzles if you get stuck and come back later. There is also a puzzle gallery to replay favorites. This is also the type of game where you keep trying to put it down, but get that "well I'll just do one more puzzle" feeling, and suddenly you're sucked back in.

There is plenty to do, and the game will probably take several hours to complete, and the whole experience would almost be worth it to see the artwork alone, so animation fans take note. The box cover gives you an excellent idea of the quality and tone of artwork presented throughout the game, in fact.

The only drawback is the fact that some puzzles are in fact quite hard, and I would not recommend this game to very young children, as the level of reading and math and logic may be above their level, and at times it feels almost like doing homework. If that sort of thing is up your alley and you like using your brain while playing games, you could do no better than this game.

tricky tricky

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: April 20, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Really great game if you love puzzle games. Its challenging enough so that it took 3 people (two college grads and a high school student) to finish (maybe we're just slow), but at the same time it's simple enough so that my 11yr old brother can play. It's really tricky and you can easily spend hours working on a puzzle only to find out the answer is a simple "1". Its mostly stylus play so you get the most out of your DS.

A bonus is that you can go online and download more puzzles when you finish the game. :) There's 160 puzzles in all. 112 loaded in the game and the rest from the downloads.

New and Exciting game for all ages!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: April 06, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I purchased this game for me to help keep my brain active. Both of my children, ages 15 and 16 laughed at me for buying such a "stupid" game. Well, I haven't been able to play my "stupid" game because my kids are playing it!!!!!!!! Contantly! I woke up early this Sunday morning to get my hands on it and my 15 year old son already had it! Needless to say, this isn't a "stupid" game anymore and I need to buy another one as well as another DS that I can hide from them! Buy this game....everyone will love it.

Wonderful Brain Teasers

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: May 28, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a mystery adventure game interspersed with a variety of puzzles. We follow the Professor and his young assistant Luke around the very mysterious village of St. Mystere as they search for the equally mysterious Golden Apple.

The game has been lovingly crafted with a distinctive visual style that should appeal to children and grown-ups alike. If you've seen Les Triplettes De Belleville or are familiar with the films of Studio Ghibli then you will instantly feel at home in St. Mystere. The various locations around the village - as well as its inhabitants - have a distinctive hand-drawn appearance and the story has a habit of shooting off in unexpected directions.

Like all the best DS games, it's hard to imagine playing this one on any other portable system. Whilst exploring the village, the upper screen shows a map of your local area. A scene from the village is displayed below and navigated via a simple point-and-tap system. Hidden 'puzzle coins' - the game's currency - as well as hidden puzzles are found by tapping on barrels, windows and other items on the lower screen. Villagers can be selected to talk to and more often than not, they will help you only after completing one of the 120-odd puzzles that really make this game what it is.

Clearly a lot of effort has been put into compiling the game's collection of puzzles. They usually require lateral thinking, are often maths puzzles disguised as every-day situations and there are a fair number of what I'd consider trick questions and 'gotchas' to catch you out. If you get stuck, hint coins can be exchanged for clues and if you get the answer wrong, your score decreases as you try a second or third time.

The range of puzzle difficulty varies greatly and there are bound to be a few harder ones that stump just about everyone. On a few occasions, I found myself annoyed by the answer I was expected to give. But overall, as the Professor is often heard to say, 'Every puzzle has an answer', no matter whether you got it straight away or kicked yourself when it finally came to you.

While 120 puzzles may seem like a lot, the game ended too soon for me. Perhaps that's a good sign; I spent over ten hours in the Curious Village before the story reached its conclusion but it's certainly no epic. But if there's a lack of quantity, it is easily made up in quality.

Loved it but wanted a little more....

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: March 03, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Great art and characters, but I would have liked for the game to last longer and for the puzzles to be more challenging. On the plus side,it is a game that my sons (ages 5 and 7) and I could sit down and work on together, trading turns on puzzles.

Fun, but disappointingly easy and short

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: May 27, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Let's get one thing out of the way. This is one amazingly presented game. Art style, character designs, animated sequences, voice acting, music.... Everything about this game exudes its unique personality that you don't find often in games. Plus, the story is fun, and the interface is near flawless (my only complaint is that some hidden items require a bit *too* precise of a click with the stylus to reveal -- a truly minor complaint). This is top-notch stuff.

If there is one thing that this point-and-click adventure + brainteaser game let me down, it's the difficulty of the puzzles. They are mostly too easy.

I like puzzles. I like games that depend on logic (like Minesweeper or Picross). But I am not one to go out of my way to FIND puzzles -- i.e., I don't buy puzzle books, and I don't scour puzzle sites to find puzzles to solve. I solve what comes my way. (This is probably the best place to mention that I got this game as a birthday gift.)

And I have to say, I found myself breezing through most of the puzzles. I recognized a good number of puzzles from elsewhere, and a lot of the questions were simple trick questions where all you have to do is discard the superfluous information the question throws at you. Yes, there ARE tough puzzles (some took me more than an hour to figure out), but they are much too few and far in between.

I completed the game -- including finding and solving all 135 puzzles the game has to offer -- in roughly 16 hours with about 160 Hint Coins left. I have read online posts where people claimed to have finished the game in less than 10 hours, and I don't doubt them. (Hint Coins are hidden items in the game that you can use to get hints about a puzzle, one hint for one Hint Coin. Needless to say, I found a lot, and didn't use many. I think I used about 15 Hint Coins total. Surely I would have finished the game sooner if I wasn't so stingy with the coins.)

Also hurting is the fact that once you beat the game, there really is no reason to come back to it. Sure, you can download weekly puzzles over Wifi, but it's just one puzzle per week, and most are "oh that's easy" variety. (Someone at Nintendo or Level-5 should proofread the downloadable puzzles, by the way. One puzzle says "cube" when it clearly means "square.")

All in all, I did have a lot of fun with this game. As I said previously, the presentation of this game really adds a lot of charm to what could have been a boring collection of puzzles. And I really liked the story. It's a shame that most of those puzzles were not very challenging.

Recommended, but don't expect tons of playtime, especially if you consider yourself to be good at logic puzzles.

Charming, but a little empty

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: March 03, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Professor Layton is a game with excellent art direction, fun cutscenes, and great writing. It's a pity the puzzles were so easy, as that really put a damper on my enjoyment.

There are well over a hundred puzzles in this game, but they're all "classic" puzzles, which I've seen many times before, and know the tricks to solving. Magic squares? Check. River-crossing puzzles? They're there. Lateral thinking puzzles? Yep, those too. And because the puzzles weren't very inventive, they seldom took me more than 30 seconds to solve.

Which is a shame, because the rest of the game was so well put together. I really wanted to love it, but the puzzles were the core of the game, and that's where it fell flat.

Addendum 1: If you're not familiar with the classic puzzle types, then by all means play this game. It's very well put together.

Addendum 2: "7 Squares" was an awesome puzzle, and I loved solving it. If only there were more like it.

Love this game!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: February 12, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is the best game I have bought in a long time. It is hard for me to put it down. My son and I are both playing it as there are 3 seperate files you can save in. I am not very experienced in ds so could anyone tell me how you download the new puzzles??
This game is a must buy. I am anxiously awaiting #2.

One of the best adult games for the DS yet!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: February 13, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Others have already written excellent reviews of this game. I just want to add that it's a great game for adults. There are no time limits, nor anything to chase down and kill. The puzzles vary from easy to hard, all are fun though.The puzzles,sounds,voices and little movies combine to make this a very entertaining game. The story that the puzzles are wrapped in is a nice little mystery too.
I think this game could be played by an older child, though I think an adult would love this game. Be prepared to lose a few to this game.

Great game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: February 16, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I received this game from Amazon on Monday. I finished it on Thursday. Not because it was easy or short, I just couldn't put it down. The puzzle solving was fun, frustrating and fulfilling. The weekly downloads are a plus. I can't wait for the sequel.

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