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Professor Layton and the Curious Village Review
Written by Jonathan Glover on Monday, February 25, 2008
User Score
Lush presentation. Puzzle mix is perfect.
The sequels can't come soon enough
On the subject of "games as art", Warren Spector once said, "...games are an art, and we're out of balance. We're a commercial art, which means we've got to balance commerce and art." All arguments aside as to what defines "art" and why games are or are not "art" (e.g. emotive design vs. focus tested wankery), the gist of the message is that balancing the two (commerce and art) is often pretty difficult in this relatively young, market-driven medium. Take for instance the closure of boutique developers such as Clover and Spector's own Looking Glass Studios; no matter how endearing or innovative your work is, you can't survive if you ain't bringin' in the bacon. With that in mind, it's amazing what developer Level-5 has done in Professor Layton and the Curious Village: they've created an incredibly intelligent, captivating game that also has mass market appeal.
At its core Layton appears to be nothing more than a simple adventure game wrapped around over a hundred brain teasers. As the dynamic duo of Professor Hershel Layton and his puzzle-solving boy apprentice, Luke, you're off to the quiet village of St. Mystere on a quest to solve the mystery of "The Golden Apple" and in the process find yourself entrenched in a brutal murder investigation. Very Holmesian, I know. You proceed with your investigation, which is divided into chapters, by traversing the small town, meeting townsfolk and solving puzzles, as apparently the locals have a penchant for the puzzle.
The puzzles, swiped directly from Akira Tago's popular "Mental Gymnastics" books, run the gamut from mind-numbingly easy to punch-a-hole-in-the-wall hard. Thankfully, not all are required for progression of the story and a hint system (utilizing "hint coins" found by tapping your stylus on random objects scattered throughout the environment, much like a traditional point-and-click adventure) is in place to prevent Mathletics flunkies like myself from becoming overly frustrated. Unlike Professor Layton and Pandora's Box (the Japanese sequel to Curious Village which will hopefully (please) come stateside soonish), the puzzles in this game generally have little or nothing to do with the narrative. You just happen to be a puzzle aficionado in a strange place full of like-minded eccentrics. While the puzzles on their own would be a little clinical under the Touch Generations banner of brain training and dog grooming simulations, they manage to become genuinely compelling while covered in the chocolatey goodness of Layton's whimsical presentation .
Pre-release, the game's art direction became stylistically synonymous with the "Triplets of Belleville". As the release date crept up, writers were comparing it to Studio Ghibli, Osamu Tezuka, Herge and just about every piece of Franco-Danish animation they could drudge up on Wikipedia in an effort to differentiate their coverage. Ultimately, the "Triplets" comparison is most apt. The entire world is colored in a muted, well-worn autumnal palette. Characters are humble, old world in appearance yet comically exaggerated and everything, from the cracks in the cobbled street to a wine bottle on a dusty window sill, exudes storybook Europe.
Fully animated shorts (which look great on the decidedly low-tech Nintendo DS screen) are interspersed throughout your adventure and help to instill a sense of attachment to Professor Layton and the boy wonder while, propelling you along on your investigation, the score consists of macabre, lurching accordion, bandonion and glockenspiel that sound as if ripped straight from a Fellini flick. It's all so perfect.
And it is perfect. Whether or not Akihiro Hino and the crew at Level-5 built the world upon the foundation of the puzzles or vice versa, it melds into a cohesive miracle that's greater than the sum of its undeniably fantastic parts. They've already sold millions of copies between the two Japanese releases, and if Nintendo's North American marketing push has anything to say about it, this release will probably follow suit. It's well-deserved as not only have they dismissed the genre trappings of the staid brain training phenomenon but they've created a great game and, more importantly, a great piece of art.
