Professor Layton and the Curious Village [NDS/2008]

System Played: Nintendo DS

Year Released: 2008

Year Reviewed: 2015

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is the first in the now prolific puzzle game series from developer, Level-5.

The series concerns the adventures of famous archaeologist and puzzle solving detective, Professor Hershel Layton, and his apprentice Luke, this time out to solve an inheritance dispute in the titular curious village of St. Mystere ...it certainly sounds mysterious!

Some rich old codger has popped his clogs and Layton has been called in by the widow to solve the case, which turns out to mean spending the whole time getting the run around from a village full of bizarrely ugly jerks and weirdo’s, who are all completely obsessed with solving puzzles (for some reason).


The game itself consists moving from static screen to screen, clicking on villagers to instigate conversation in the hope of progressing the story, but more often than not being thrown into a puzzle that rarely has anything to do with the immediate situation in St. Mystere.

In all, there are 100+ of these abstract puzzles, all just unrelated brain teasers unconnected with the larger story/setting.


Outside of the puzzles and character text screens, you get a street view of the town to move around in via cursors (with the top screen displaying an overall map of the village), and click on foreground elements, like villagers, to interact with them.

Also on these street screens you can find hidden ‘hint coins’ which, as the name suggests, can be used in puzzles you’re having trouble with to give you (up to three) clues.

For each new screen you visit in a chapter, just click everywhere at random on the off chance that something will have a coin or hidden puzzle on it. There are usually a few per screen, and you’ll end up with many more hint coins than you’ll ever be able to use, so don’t feel you need to save these for later.

The St. Mystere screens just involve lots of walking around the same streets/screens, talking to the same few characters, and this aspect of the game certainly starts to feel like a drag the more you play. It’s just so repetitive.


As stated, the puzzles (which make up the majority of the experience) never really have much to do with the story or setting. They’re all math and logic problems, pairing up objects, odd ones out, selecting the right object from a series of choices, etc. or geometry. So depending how you feel about doing these sorts of things ‘for fun’ may be a clue as to whether you want to play this game or not.

Each puzzle comes with text instructions on the top screen and you have to use the touchscreen in some fashion to solve.

They’re all worth so many ‘Picarats’, basically points, and guessing wrong reduces the number of Picarats you’re rewarded on your next go, as an attempt to stop you from just jumping at answers I guess.

There are no time limits on puzzles, so they aren’t as stressful as they could be, but I found a lot of them seemed to be based on quite iffy logic, if not straight up ‘trick’ questions which annoyed me a bit.


Sometimes when you’re close to the right answer, or just can’t be arsed anymore (because you’ve worked out it is another of those bullshit trick questions), you can find yourself going through any answers in order, until you hit the right one.

This results in fewer Picarats, but they don’t even have a use in the game, instead used for unlocking superfluous bonus materials, so there isn’t much of a deterrent there.

You don’t even have to solve puzzles right there and then either (though this is the way I chose to play), instead you can skip and come back to them later if you want. I guess this is another way of making sure people never really ‘get stuck’, this being a game marketed to Nintendo’s now lucrative ‘casual’ demographic.

At certain points in the game you hit walls where you do need to have solved a minimum number of puzzles in order to progress, but these barriers always seemed to be quite low.


The Curious Village and all the Layton games have a nice anime art style, as you’d expect from Level-5. Although static text screens make up the majority of the experience, there are some nice full motion video and voice over scenes included (mostly at the beginning and end), with some truly dodgy accents.

The game also have a nice, though thoroughly repetitive soundtrack. It sounds very French. Lots of accordion.


In a lot of ways, Professor Layton and the Curious Village feels like a progression of those Brain Training games that were popular for God knows what reason on the DS for about 5 minutes, but with a story kind of tacked on.

The fact that none of the puzzles have anything to do with the story doesn’t make for a very cohesive experience. The story itself turns out to be pretty weak in the end and the characters, though interesting at first (because of their extreme weirdness), don’t hold your attention the whole way through.

The puzzles start to feel too samey, all being of similar ‘types’ without much variety, and some just leave you feeling annoyed even after you’ve solved them because, (not mutually exclusively) they’re no fun to solve, badly explained, you haven’t done any maths since you left school 15 years ago!, or they’re just plain trick questions!!

Despite some issues, I still kind of enjoyed Professor Layton and the Curious Village, I think because it was a bit different, though with so many sequels now rushed out due to it’s success, I think I’d get bored of the series quick if they’re all just like this one.

6/10