Beside the myriad of puzzles that you’ll come up against, there are also a number of items for you to collect too. In Professor Layton’s bag where the main menu is you’ll find that you must collect the pieces to a jigsaw puzzle and a robot dog. Once you put those pieces together, you’re ready to unlock more puzzles to solve. But item collecting doesn’t just stop there because you can also collect furniture to help decorate the Professor and Luke’s empty rooms. Satisfy their tastes and you’ll unlock even more content! You might be glad to know that there’s no pixel hunting involved to collect these items. They’re all rewards from solving puzzles.


Can you decorate the rooms to our heroes’ tastes?
Once puzzles are solved, explanations or descriptions are given so that you understand more about the puzzle. You can also replay them at anytime but the problem with this is of course, you’ll already know how to solve them but you can always try them on friends. But, if the 130 puzzles or so in the game isn’t enough for you, you can download a new puzzle using Wi-Fi every week for a year from the game’s release date.


New weekly puzzles for download until 2008? Yes, indeed.
Another interesting feature is that whenever you load a game again, the game gives you a summary of the events that has happened so far so, if you’ve stopped playing for a long period of time, you don’t have to worry about forgetting what the story is about!

Graphics have a nice hand drawn feeling to it all with a rich old English atmosphere in the surroundings. Colours are dimmed and faded while there is slow French-like music playing in the background, portraying just the right mood for the “mysterious town”. Characters have a very simple design to them but are alive with little movements. You won’t find them standing or sitting around doing nothing – their eyes blink, some twitch about, some are breathing heavily etc. When you engage in conversation, their mouths move and they change poses as lines of dialogue scroll across the screen.


The short movies are well animated but, Yo Oizumi could work on his voice acting.
The short animated letter boxed movies spread out throughout the story are smooth and look crisp for the DS but, performances were varied for the two actors who were taking on voice acting for the very first time. Yo Oizumi, the voice actor for Professor Layton did a poor job. Throughout most of the game, it sounded like he was trying to speed through the lines as quickly as possible. Maki Horikata on the other hand did a much better job at portraying Luke’s voice with emotion. The rest of the cast did a fine job with the experience they gained as Anime voice actors such as Atsuko Tanaka who was Madame Salome’s voice. Unfortunately the game doesn’t contain full voice acting – only during the short movies and certain in-game scenes but it’s enough for you to have a good impression of the characters.

“Layton Kyouju to Fushigi na Machi” is a stylishly presented game for those who enjoy cleverly crafted and challenging problems one after the other. Although the puzzles could be implemented into the game world in a more natural fashion, Level 5 have done well for their first attempt a genre that they are unfamiliar with. I look forward to the next set of brainstorming puzzles in their second Professor Layton title!


Without understanding what the text says during puzzles, there’s only a very few you can guess your way through. And since the main gameplay is all about solving the puzzles, you’ll be losing out on all the fun anyway if you just guessed. You’ll just have to wait for an English version or use our translation guide!

• Variety of puzzles to solve.
  
• Puzzles never stop appearing so you’ll never be bored.
  
• Items to find and collect.
  
• Wi-Fi offers more puzzles to download.
  
• Can use touch screen for any workings.
  
• Great music and graphics that suit the mysterious mood.

• Minimal interaction with the environments.
  
• Can feel like an e-book full of puzzles than an adventure game.