Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box

Featuring a completely fresh set of everyday, human characters, as well as a genre not generally as popular with mainstream audiences, the first title in Nintendo’s new franchise, _Professor Layton and the Curious Village_, quickly and unexpectedly became a huge commercial and critical success soon following its release. It should come as no revelation then that Nintendo released a sequel, _Pandora’s Box_, less than a year later.

The plot of _Pandora’s Box_ continues from where the previous game left off, with the titular Professor Hershel Layton and his self-proclaimed child apprentice, Luke, tracking down clues to solve a new mystery; Layton’s mentor, Doctor Schrader, has been found dead from no apparent cause. A letter from the Doctor shortly before his death suggests that he had found The Devil’s Box, an elusive and legendary antique box said to kill whoever opens it. The only other clue is a ticket for a luxury train, The Molentary Express, and so the two puzzle-seekers set off, only to find that the train, the towns it visits, and the mysterious box are all enigmatically linked.

The delightful story is divided into ten “mysteries” which have to be solved and essentially the point-and-click adventuring element forms an interactive novel. The labelling of the mysteries seems very arbitrary and in reality, I didn’t actually have to do much to “solve” them other than talk to every character – Layton and Luke figure out most of these mysteries themselves in the natural course of the story. This made me feel that I wasn’t really participating in the overall plot but rather just spectating.

Solving the puzzles found everywhere, of course, is the core element of the gameplay, and this is what you’ll be doing during for most of the fifteen hours or so that the game lasts for. After all, this is a puzzle game first and an adventure game second, and there are over 150 of them to be discovered by talking to various people and prodding everything you see in the overworld with the stylus like some sort of crazed acupuncturist. Earlier puzzles in the game are designed to slowly ease in newcomers to the series and an average person should be able to breeze through the first twenty or so with no problems. The puzzles gradually get harder and take on a welcoming variety of different forms and they all use the touch screen – you might be asked to divide up land fairly, or work out which of a group of cows is lying based on what they say about the others (that’s right, cows which not only talk but lie), or slide blocks around to get one to the exit, in addition to a few math-based riddles. There’s something there for everyone, and there were a few that left me baffled in a good way. The difficulty of each puzzle is indicated by the amount of “picarats”, or points, you can earn from solving it, with fewer points being awarded if a puzzle was attempted multiple times. This is good in that is discourages blindly guessing answers, however it does also mean that when the occasional confusingly-worded riddle appears, the player is docked points for misunderstanding the question rather than not following an logical process. The overall difficulty is clearly designed with younger teens in mind, and as such I felt there could have been a few more really hard ones in there to satisfy me.

Fortunately, if you do get stuck, you can purchase up to three hints per puzzle by finding “hint coins” hidden around the game world. But these hints are not always helpful, and many on the harder puzzles just contained useless trivia, which left me feeling a bit cheated by the game considering there are only a limited number of hint coins to be found.

An interesting note is that quite a few of the compulsory puzzles bear little or no relevance to the story at hand. This is no bad thing though, and didn’t make them any less fun to solve. There are still many which are relevant, for example piecing together a torn photograph, and these were the only times where I felt I was truly solving mysteries myself and as a result, these puzzles were more memorable and interesting.

There are also a few mini-games which develop with the main game. Occasionally you will find hamster toys which you can use to construct an exercise course for Luke’s grossly obese pet hamster. You are asked to find pieces of a camera, which when assembled unlock a series of spot-the-difference scenes. There is also a tea-brewing game; because of course, every typical English gent carries around a tea set and a plethora of obscure hot beverage ingredients, obsessively forcing everyone who hints at being thirsty to drink tea. All of these are fun distractions from the main game, offering a suitable alternative if you need a break from the brain-bending puzzles and mysteries. Completing these mini-games unlocks further bonus puzzles.
Other bonuses include weekly downloadable puzzles if you have an internet connection, character art and profiles, and a code which you can use to unlock a puzzle in the previous game if you have it.

The puzzles alone aren’t what make the game such a joy to play, though, as it is such an auditory and visual treat. All of the explorable scenes in the overworld and all of the puzzle images are gorgeously drawn. The townspeople this time around are animated, giving a little more life to the backgrounds. The story is told not only through text conversations, but a few exchanges are fully voice acted by an evidently talented and appropriate cast of actors, who properly capture the generic, exaggerated English accents which give the game a lot of its charm and subtle humour. There are also almost twenty minutes worth of pre-rendered animated action scenes at important plot points, which are very enjoyable to watch and a nice way for the designers to avoid excessive reading for the player.

Gentle background music composed of violins, pianos, drums, and organs gives the game a unique sound, with different tunes creating appropriate atmospheres of mystery, gloom, excitement, or whatever else is needed at the time. As a result, this game should definitely be played with headphones, as the DS’s speakers just aren’t good enough to do the music and acting justice. One minor note is that the same track is used for almost all the puzzles, and after hearing it a few dozen times it does get annoying.

Those who have not played the first Layton game may find they feel a bit out of the loop to begin with – there are a few references to the duo’s first adventure, as well as a couple of recurrent characters who are not properly introduced in this game, so I would recommend playing _Curious Village_ first. While there are few new features, anyone who loved the first game will love this one too, and I would definitely recommend it to any fan of _Curious Village_. I personally can’t wait for the next two games – which have already been released in Japan – to come to our shores.

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