Astounding Puzzles and Ambiance, Average Everything Else.
Professor Layton and the Curious Village centers around the title character, Layton, and his assistant Luke as they arrive in the small hamlet of St. Mystere to investigate a mysterious inheritance dispute. All is not as it seems however, as upon arriving Layton quickly discovers that St. Mystere has more than it's fair share of secrets. Truth be told, the story has little to do with the gameplay and can sometimes throw some pretty arbitrary plot points your way to move the story along and provide you with more time to go puzzle hunting (Go chase a cat! Oh look, another crumpled piece of paper on the ground that just happens to have a direct link to the plot!).
As arbitrary as it sometimes is, it's never unpleasant. St. Mystere and it's denizens are packed full of character and you'll genuinely enjoy meeting each and every one of the odd residents. Their main purpose as you wander throughout the town is to offer up puzzles for you to solve. At certain points in the game a certain number of puzzles will have to have been solved for the story to progress. Since the entire game is centered around the player doing and enjoying these puzzles (as the actual mystery can be solved by even the least astute player around the halfway mark) I can't imagine why anyone could ever be held back by these very lenient prerequisites for moving the plot along (unless of course you don't like puzzles, but then why are you playing this?).
The presentation is another standout point. The art has a style all it's own, and the music is catchy and fitting for the cartoon-y Scooby-doo vibe the setting has going. At several pivotal plot points the story is also fleshed out with in game hand drawn animation that is fluid and fun to watch.
Some of the puzzles genuinely had me stumped and I needed to take some time to ponder them before coming back to try and wrap my head around them. Just as many however are cheesy riddles that attempt to fool the player with tricky wording. While these can be cute at first, once you catch on to this tendency these types of puzzles offer little to no challenge.
Can't figure out a puzzle? Assume the game is being tricky and take a moment to try and interpret the wording of the question or parameters in a different light. By the end of the game, as a rule, I was just assuming the puzzles was being misleading and gave some fake trick answers to what turned out to be genuine math problems.
Complaining aside, 80% of the puzzles are genuinely enjoyable and fun to ponder. And really, isn't that all that matters in a puzzle game?
