Hey there, and welcome back to content_unavailable for another [slightly late] serving of TOTW! This week, we're talking about Professor Layton and the Curious Village, the riddlesome puzzle-solving DS game from Level-5!
I've recently been playing a lot more on the ol' 3DS, and now that I've homebrewed it and am able to put pretty much whatever game I want to on there, I can finally play a lot of the ones that I missed out on when the console and its predecessors were in their heydays - including this one, the first game in the Professor Layton series. In Curious Village, you take control of Professor Hershel Layton and his apprentice Luke as they're invited to a mysterious [or perhaps, curious?] village in the middle of nowhere to help resolve an inheritance dispute: The village's Baron, Augustus Reinhold, left in his passing a so-called 'Golden Apple', hidden somewhere in the village, with the person who finds it being granted Baron Reinhold's fortune. Basically, it's Ready Player One four years before Ready Player One.
Throughout the game, you not only solve puzzles in a point-and-click style fashion, with you needing to find your way around the town of St. Mystere on your own, but you also solve riddles. In fact, that's the main method of progression - riddles. There're over a hundred of these little brainteasers in the game for you to solve, ranging from your run-of-the-mill foxes and chickens on a river puzzle to more obscure ones that might even require you to get out a pen and some paper and start doing algebra [I had to do this more times than I care to admit. Did I overcomplicate it? Maybe. Was it fun? Hell yeah]. The riddles are definitely the driving force of the game, and I really liked their challenge level - there weren't many that were too easy, and there weren't many that were too hard. Most riddles had a satisfying and attainable answer that just made me feel really good when I managed to figure them out, which is the perfect difficulty for this type of game!
Aside from the gameplay, though, there are a couple of other things I want to briefly mention: First off, there's the animated cutscenes - there aren't many in the game, but the ones that are there are fully 2D-animated in a really cute style, and fully voiced. There's also music, which naturally persists throughout the entire game, and this soundtrack is honestly really good. It's not something I'd imagine listening to outside of playing the game, but it was good enough to the point where I didn't feel the urge to play other music on top of it.
Overall, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a really solid puzzle game, and I really look forward to playing through the rest of the games in the series. Thanks for reading, and I'll catch you next week for another TOTW!
Extra Info:
Official Website
