If you look at any page of my blog, you can see how much I love puzzle games. For some reason, the concept of solving logic conundrums is really fun to me, and it always has been. But between my bad games of Tetris and a lot of Flash escape rooms that I solved, no puzzle series had a impact on me than the one started by Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Launched in 2008 for the Nintendo DS (but now available for Android and iOS in this "HD for Mobile" remaster), it's not only the start of one of my favorite franchises in gaming, but also an amazing concept that is almost perfectly executed.

An activity book that makes you cry

The best way I can explain what is a Professor Layton game is as "an activity book that makes you cry". Half of the time you will be solving a lot of enigmas and tricky questions, but the rest of your game will be a story full of mysteries, incredible characters and a need for a little bit of suspension of disbelief by the player. The plot starts with Hershel Layton, a professor of archeology and puzzle expert from London, and Luke Triton, his loyal apprentice, being invited to solve a strange case of inheritance.

They were invited to St. Mystere, a curious village where the late Baron Reinhold lived until his death. Instead of going direct to the family, his immense fortune is promised to the one that can found an artifact known as the Golden Apple. Invited by the widow, Layton and Luke must explore the village, find its secrets and understand why everyone is so obsessed with puzzles.

The story is mostly shown in the veins of an adventure / visual novel game: you can walk through the village, talk to people, find some items and solve a lot of puzzles in between. Key moments, although, are shown in gorgeous animated clips, that were burned in my memory for years. As the player, you cannot solve the mysteries per se, but the hints of what's going on are revealed through each chapter, culminating in an shocking ending. (It isn't the best ending on the series, but it's one of my favorites!)

Every puzzle has an answer!

But, well, this amazing plot can be the wrapper, but inside there's a lot of questions to solve and think about. Curious Village has way more content that I remembered: 100 puzzles in the main game (plus 20 extra ones hidden in the scenarios), and even more in post-game content. When solving some of them, you also get items for 3 different minigames, including a painting jigsaw and a room decorating mega-puzzle.

Instead of falling back of a dozen concepts and iterate on them, you can expect a LOT of different things when solving the puzzles in here. For better or worse, they are not really integrated into the map: when you find a new enigma to answer, you go to a different screen, with a text introducing the problem. Some of them are interactive (like my archenemies, the sliding puzzles), but a lot of them are multiple choice questions or expecting a number as an answer.

It's important to say that this variety is one of the highest points of the Layton series for me, but it's also a thing that can bother a little. Having so much different styles of enigmas is fun, but you are probably will encounter some that you gonna hate forever. Also, it's hard to connect all of them to what's happening in the plot, so the pacing of Curious Village can be strange: situations like "you are at the middle of accusing someone of murder but now you need to answer this math question" are kinda of common. For me, it's part of the franchise's charm, but it also can disturb some players.

To balance out this mechanical diversity, two systems are present in the game. The Hint Coins are a limited currency used to, well, getting hints on the puzzles! They are hidden in the background in specific spots (like boxes, windows or cracks in the wall) and they needed to be touched to be collected — what can be a little grindy if you only choose to touch every corner of the drawing. The other one are Picarats, a type of ranking points you gain from submitting right answers. Each wrong try on a puzzle decrease how much Picarats you gain from it, a way to avoid trial-and-error, but having less Picarats will just get you less concept art at the Bonuses section, so...

A lot of the puzzles involve diagrams or math, so the game also has a Memo function in each puzzle, that helps you draw in the screen as a draft for your thinking. There isn't a lot of functions, but you can sketch at the top of the puzzle image, that helps a lot when solving mazes, for example. I didn't need to use pen and paper not even once!

Revisiting St. Mystere in HD

This is a peculiar situation for me because I don't usually replay games. But I was introduced many years ago to this franchise with a Nintendo DS cartridge of Curious Village as a gift from a huge friend and, since then, Professor Layton became one of my favorite series in gaming. So, replaying the game years later in the "HD for Mobile" version was really an interesting experience.

The content was mostly the same, as you may expect, including the Golden Apple mystery that is one of my favorites in the entire series. The puzzles, though, I had a little bit of mixed opinions about them. I didn't remember how many of them are just tricky questions: they put a lot of numbers, but the real answer is based on one detail in the text. But a lot of them are really great to solve (even having solved it once before) so it was also fun!

A cool thing they did and I didn't expected was porting all the Weekly Puzzles to this HD version. Back in 2008, players could get an extra puzzle every week through the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, that was already shutdown when I played the game on the DS. So I got 27 puzzles that I never had seen before! Always cool to preserve all the content for a game in new releases.

Another adaptation they did in the HD version was related to the Secret Door. The original Layton games were planned as a trilogy from the beginning, so you could unlock extra content in Curious Village if you input a code from the sequel. Now, you can find Puzzle Charms — for some reason, inspired by the Layton's daughter's anime — together with Hint Coins to unlock the same content. I didn't wanted to get them all, but they are there.

Besides that, it's Curious Village in HD and it's a blast to play it in the phone. The HD cutscenes (including some original ones) are great and can be seen in landscape mode, writing in the screen using the finger is way worse than using the DS' stylus, and I loved to experience it all over again.

Even though the series' formula will only reach its potential in the sequels, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is still an amazing game. Inside this strange concept, you will encounter lovable characters, a crazy mystery and way more puzzles than you expect to solve. It has it's problems, but I can see myself going back, once more, to St. Mystere in some years just to find, once more, the Golden Apple. I'm really happy to see how great this HD version is, and I hope it helps to having Layton and Luke's adventures to be more accessible than never.