LogFAQs > #932438244

#56





Years of release: 2011 (3DS, Japan), 2012 (3DS, NA/EU/AU)
Beaten?: Yes

The Professor Layton series is a model of consistency. Play one of these games, and you know exactly what you're going to get. Professor Layton and his apprentice, Luke, are going to go on a crazy adventure in a mysterious town full of puzzle-loving inhabitants, and along the way you are going to run into some bizarre plot shit while also helping some kindly old grandma solve a block-sliding puzzle.

The characters (especially the protagonists) and world are charming and the plots are amusing enough to keep me going, but I'm MAINLY here for the puzzles. I think it's already clear enough by this point on the list but I fucking love a good puzzle game, and Layton is full of various, bite-sized logic teasers. I feel like this game hits just the right balance - the puzzles are rarely so hard as to provide significant frustration, but rarely so easy that they require no thought at all - just right in that sweet spot in the middle, where you feel just clever enough for figuring it out, but you didn't have to drive yourself crazy figuring it out, and the variety is such that if you have trouble with one puzzle (for instance, if you're like me and suck at visualizing 3D objects), the next one might be more up your alley. Right on that edge between challenging and relaxing, which is ideally where I like my games to be most of the time.

Aside from having some of the more interesting plot shit and some really cool almost Zelda-like segments to break up the action, what sets Miracle Mask apart from the rest of the series for me are the downloadable puzzles. There's a bunch of different 'types' of puzzles here with their own rulesets, with a handful of puzzles each, and they're almost all really great. I especially like the alchemy ones where you have to draw a certain number of lines between beakers, the ones where you have to put down mirrors to reflect laser beams at ghosts, and the ones where you have to draw lines of ducks on a grid so that none of them are facing or too close to each other. I've gotten a good 40 hours probably out of the downloadable puzzles alone, nevermind the main story! They're all really well-designed and challenging, and unfortunately, Miracle Mask's followup, Azran Legacy, wasn't as good in this area.

Honorable Mention: Professor Layton and the Unwound Future

Oops! To be honest, I didn't even bother to check the DS Laytons to see if any of them came out this decade, but it turns out, the 3rd and 4th ones did. Unwound Future is probably my favorite of the main stories in the games, just because all the time travel stuff is a really good hook, and I think this game had a lot of good puzzles in it, since it was after the 1st game where some of the puzzle designs were still rough around the edges, but before the later games where they started to run out of good ideas for new puzzles. I probably would have ranked this in the 50's or 60's as well, but I don't have too much extra to say about two different Layton games, so just mentioning it here will do. I really did forget that it came out in 2010 though.