Game Review: Professor Layton and Pandora's Box

This game follows Professor Layton and his pupil, Luke, as they try to solve the mystery of a box that is rumoured to kill anyone who opens it. There is a strong linear story that you follow by solving brain teaser type puzzles along the way. Everyone you meet has a puzzle or two for you to solve and there are some cute mini games on the side as well.

Review Date: 19/10/2009

Platform:Nintendo DS

In a few words:

The Good: Puzzles quick to solve, which makes you want to keep going.

The Bad: Hard to find final puzzles and people you have missed, especially when trying to give solve the tea challenges. Lots of clicking through dialogue that you have already heard.

Story:

The game begins by putting you right into the mystery about the box straight away. Then we follow the Professor and Luke as they catch a train to try and follow the trail. We are introduced to a large number of characters on the train and the villages you stop in and you also get new traveling companions too. In some respects the story was the main emphasis of the game. Luckily, the story was quite interesting, yet it was completely linear and nothing you did changed this. (If you didn't finish some puzzles the story would not be able to continue. )

A handy feature of the game is that when you reload a saved game it tells you what the story is so far so that you know what your current goal is. Also, you can look up Layton's Diary to find out more detail on what you have learnt so far. This feature means that the game is suited to being played for long periods at at time with breaks in between (I love a game that recognises you may not be able to finish it in one sitting). If you want to just play one puzzle at a time it can get irritating to have to click through the whole "story so far" section before getting down to the game.

It was frustrating sometimes when you had solved part of a mystery in your head, but the professor and Luke hadn't. I kind of wanted some way to tell them they were being silly. In these cases you just had to keep solving puzzles until they eventually figured it out. So in all, there were a few plot sillynesses, but it was a mostly stable plot that wasn't entirely predictable.

Gameplay:

To navigate and interact with the game you use the stylus exclusively. The game definitely involves clicking through a lot of dialogue, some of it wanted and needed, but a lot of it repeated if you accidently poked the wrong area on the screen. There are over 150 puzzles that are extremely diverse so that some puzzles only had an extremely loose connection to the story, which was probably OK, but it did seem a bit contrived for a few of them. Some puzzles seem excessively simple, and others seemed excessively hard. I'm older than the targeted audience (I assume pre to early teens) and I was surprised at some of the things they expected you to know. Luckily, the hint system usually helped you out, so that you could "cheat" and not get stuck on a puzzle for too long.

The main puzzle types included mathematical calculations, sliding/rearranging, correct placement of objects, which shape to choose, word puzzles, maze traverses, illusions, and observation. The main problem I had with the puzzles was that there was no consistent way to enter a solution, which perhaps is a problem caused by the diversity of the puzzles themselves. Some you circled and then clicked "submit". Other puzzles you clicked on and it instantly sent in the answer. This meant that for the instant response puzzles, if you hadn't noticed that it was this sort of puzzle you could accidentally submit an answer you hadn't intended. I think this lack of consistency between submitting answers to multiple choice puzzles was something that could easily have been fixed. Although the final puzzle you meet in story mode had a cool solution, it was so out of the box and unlike ANY of the other puzzles, that I think it was unreasonable to expect anyone to think of the answer without the aid of the hints.

There are a number of great mini games that you can play on the side. In one of these you collect parts of a camera, assemble it and then you can take photos of scenes to spot the difference and unlock more puzzles. Another mini-game pits your wits against a hamster in need of exercise. Another mini-game involves making tea recipes that you can serve to the characters you meet on your journey. These mini-games are great because they add depth to the game and allow you to change your pace if you're stuck on one of the normal puzzles. I personally loved the hamster game and was disappointed I finished it so quickly, I kind of wanted some sort of extra incentive for getting the hamster even fitter than he needed to be.

Game elements (graphics, physics, AI):

The characters are very cute cartoon characters which mostly just pop up on the screen to say what they need to. There are also a few lovely animated cut scenes to move the story on without you having to click through the dialogue (quite a relief when the animation begins, I got frustrated with the illusion that I was interacting with the game when I was forced to click through excessive amounts of dialogue). My favourite character was the hamster, who manages to look adorable no matter what size/weight he is. The graphics and sounds reminded me of watching cartoons when I was little; there was something just so familiar and classic about the feel of the game.

The characters are entirely scripted and have a somewhat childish dialogue. This would be fine if you didn't have to hear the same lines again and again when you click on a character to see if something new has happened since the last time you talked to them. It should have been possible that when you clicked on someone who had no new information you could select "hear what they said last time" (in case you had forgotten or needed to be reminded) or "cancel interaction", so you could just walk away.

Other Comments:

I haven't played the previous Prof. Layton game, but this didn't disadvantage me at all. A couple of characters were from the previous game, but all were re-introduced and explained appropriately. My main annoyance with this game was at the end after I had finished the story. I was then put back into the game at a time that was earlier than the finale (which meant that if you accidently clicked on the wrong character the ENTIRE finale would play out without you being able to stop it!). However, the puzzles I hadn't found were not put in Granny's house as puzzles that you miss at other times were (I thought this feature was great and was annoyed that it didn't follow through to the end). This meant I had to trudge around looking for the puzzles. It was annoying that before you clicked on someone you couldn't tell whether they had a new puzzle for you (as they sometimes did) or whether they would just spout the same words they had last time you had clicked on them. This meant that I spent a lot of time going around clicking on people to see if something different had turned up. The puzzle index was a great idea, but frustrating that within the puzzle index you could only play games that you had already completed. This meant that instead of being able to click on the games you hadn't completed and finish them in one go, you had to walk around to that area and complete them there.

Further, trying to finish the tea serving mini-game was horrible. I had no idea who I had given tea to or not. And since characters did not always show that they wanted tea, I had to go around every character again and check them all in a very painful and long winded way. A nice list of who I had/hadn't given tea to would have helped me so much.

This game was a wonderful game, if slightly sullied from too much clicking through unnecessary dialogue. I played this game for almost two days solidly and got completely hooked on it. It was probably the feeling that if I just did one more puzzle I'd be able to unlock a new story element. I always knew what I should be doing next and was never completely stuck. Not to mention the fact that I just loved it when I could solve a puzzle without looking at any of the hints.