Level 5 has long been famous for their quality PS2 RPGs such as Dragon Quest VIII, Dark Chronicles and the more recent Rogue Galaxy. It wasn’t until last year they started to expand into the handheld market with their first title being the SRPG, “Jeanne D’arc” for the PSP and now, President Akihiro Hino has finally decided to try developing for a different genre on the DS – adventure games. But this wasn’t going to be a visual novel like Phoenix Wright nor was it going to be an adventure game where you hunt for objects and tried to figure out how to use them with environments. “Professor Layton and the Mysterious Town” is the first title of an adventure game trilogy where you’re going to be solving lots and lots of riddles and puzzles.

The story begins with Professor Layton, an archaeologist who loves puzzles, receiving a letter one day from Madame Salome of the wealthy Linford Family asking him to help search for Alan Linford’s hidden fortune. Sensing a tint of mystery, Layton decides to visit a mysterious town with his young assistant Luke. Little did he know about the various mysteries that lay ahead of him.


The Professor receives a request to help find the hidden fortunes of Alan Linford.
Right after the well animated opening video, you are challenged with the very first and simple puzzle as Professor Layton and Luke tries to make their way to their destination. After another quick puzzle at the town entrance, you are free to make your way to the Linford Mansion while interacting with the local inhabitants. The upper screen serves as a map helpfully showing where you are and your next destination while the touch screen is where you do all the controlling from. Instead of tapping a spot for our protagonists to move to like in Western adventure games, you don’t actually see our characters until there is a puzzle or you try speaking to an NPC by tapping on them. When you want to change areas, tapping on Luke’s shoe in the corner reveals arrows to areas you can move to. It’s a very simple and easy to use system so far.


Moving around the mysterious town is nice and simple.
The main gameplay as mentioned earlier, are made up of puzzles supervised by psychologist Akira Toga, author of the best selling “Atama no Taisou (Exercising the Mind)” books in Japan. These puzzles quickly popup one after the other so you can be sure you’ll never be bored trying to figure out what to do next. The inhabitants of Mystery Town all love puzzles so it’s not a surprise that almost every single NPC you speak to during the game will give you one to solve. There are no multi-branching topics to choose from and you won’t end up with an inventory full of items to figure out.