This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

I have always liked puzzles growing up. From doing jigsaw puzzles on the family dining table, to books and books of crossword and jumble puzzles for long vacation drives with the family. Hell, some of my first video game memories are playing through classic adventure games (Monkey Island, Space Quest, etc.), those games were puzzles in their own right. That love of puzzles hasn’t died down at all as I have grown up. I still do puzzles and play adventure games, but I have become quite the convert on escape rooms, as they have grown in popularity. However, whenever I start a new puzzle or escape room I always have a small wave wash over me that questions if I am smart enough to solve these puzzles. It’s a weird form of imposter syndrome that somehow makes me feel like I am going to be exposed as being a dumb person. To who? I have no idea, but it has been this feeling that has kept me from playing any of the Layton games previously.

See my wife has loved the Layton series on 3DS for a long time. Pre-marriage she played basically three types of games. She played Farming games, she played dancing games, and she played the Layton games. I have a vivid memory of us laying in bed, pre kids, playing on our handhelds and she showed me a puzzle from one of the Layton games, asking for help and I sat there and couldn’t solve it. I don’t remember the puzzle, but I remember making two guesses incorrectly and watching the picarets decrease and then declaring myself stumped. That was enough for me, at the time, to scare me away from those Layton games. I just knew if I played them, I would fail at every puzzle and it would be a struggle to complete them with my dignity intact.

Fastforward to the era of the Switch and the release of “Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires Conspiracy,” has just happened. I purchased the game for my wife, because I knew she would appreciate it. She played it, enjoyed it, and then shelved it and I didn’t really think about it until it came up on the whole spinner as one of the potential 3 games I have to play next. I don’t remember what the other 2 games were, but I made the choice that I was finally going to face my fear and play a Layton game and if it wrecked me mentally I would at least have an interesting tale to tell.

“Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires Conspiracy” or as we are going to call it moving forward “Lady Layton,” is a puzzle game where you play as Katrielle Layton who is the daughter of Prof. Layton who helms the other 3Ds games of yore. In this game, Katrielle is opening up her own detective agency and is looking to take on cases from the lovely people of England as a way to establish some money all while trying to track down her father who disappeared. Well you can ignore the missing father piece, because that really doesn’t come up often in this game, but it helps set the scene as the people of England have certainly heard of Prof Layton, but Katrielle has to earn their respect by solving puzzles. The game takes you through 12 cases of Katrielle, which seemingly have no bearing on the previous cases, outside of a small comment, until you get to the final 12th case that ties everything together.

During each case, Katrielle is asked to solve a mystery, for instance the first case is about finding a missing hand on the big ben clock. You move through locations (not free movement, just screens), and click on people to talk to them, or to examine something in the background. Essentially every screen will have multiple hotspots that can be found by moving your cursor (a magnifying glass) over the screen and when it lights up, there is something to click on. Outside of the obvious (people), other things you might click on might be a clue or something Katrielle and her assistant discuss, it might be a hidden collectable (hint coin or literal collectable) or it will be an actual puzzle. In this world, puzzles are just a thing you find in the world that need to be solved, they are a tangible thing and apparently scattered everywhere, but more on these later. As you advance the story of the case, more locations will open up, and eventually you will start getting real clues to solving each case’s mystery. These clues are un-missable and you can’t interpret them incorrectly, collect all the clues and Katrielle can solve the mystery. Whether you see this as a detriment or a benefit, you don’t actually have to do any solving of the actual mystery. When you have gathered all the clues, Katrielle solves the mystery for you, even if the real you hasn’t drawn any real conclusions. Solving one case will unlock the next (sometimes more than one, that can be tackled in any order), and at any time you can jump back into cases you have solved to look for missing puzzles or coins that you might have missed your first time through.

The stories themselves are all fairly light hearted and while you do solve cases involving murder, theft, and financial ruin, it never really feels as dire as those crimes actually are. The characters and bright and cheery, they make quips, they have overexaggerated faces and it all feels nice and cozy. Katrielle is never in real danger, you can’t game over, and the game isn’t violent. I loved most of the characters that look as if they came straight from the anime, which surprise, they did do an anime in 2018 (a year after the 3DS release and a year before the Switch release), but again this game just looks and sounds lovely and despite being a fictitious game set in a real world location, made me want to move even more to London (or I guess visit) in order to see the sights from the game. It was so comforting, that the game plus the music, plus the puzzles did actually lull me asleep more than once. That isn’t a critique on the game, but perhaps more a comment on me.

Alright onto the puzzles, but these are going to be hard to talk about because there are over 100 puzzles and they can be very unique. In general though, these are all single screen puzzles that have you solving all manner of things, from doing math and geometry, to sequencing and brain teasers. Now everyone is going to be different, sometimes the answers just seem to pop out at you and it takes you 2 minutes to solve a puzzle, and others you might need to graph out on paper (I did) and it takes you 10 minutes to solve. If you get stuck, the hint coins that you collected can be redeemed on any puzzle to get a hint about the solution or where to focus your attention. Most puzzles have four hints available to them, and you do have to purchase them in sequential order, but if you end up purchasing all 4 hints for a puzzle, the game will all but tell you the answer. Of course finding those hint coins can involve a little bit of hunting, and there aren’t enough hint coins for you to use multiple on every puzzle, so you will have to solve some of these clean in order to preserve them. Before each puzzle you are given a clue to its difficulty in terms of how many points (picarets) you will get upon completing the puzzle. The more points it is worth, presumably the harder the puzzle is going to be. Since puzzles can be subjective this is not going to be a flawless system, as there are puzzles I struggled with that were only worth 25 points, and aced puzzles that were worth 45 without a second thought. For any puzzle, should you guess incorrectly, you can opt to try again but the puzzle will be worth less points than it was previously.

What are these points worth, I hear you asking? Well essentially nothing. In Layton games, the more points you had unlocked more bonus content. Artwork, sound files, etc. from the game you just completed. However, these points would tally at the end of the game, meaning that these points don’t mean anything during the course of a campaign. I don’t know what the cutoff is in terms of points, or if there even is one for this game, but when I finished the game, it would appear I had everything unlocked despite the fact that I did not have a perfect score and did not do any of the extra post-game puzzles. Perhaps I was missing something that I didn’t notice, but you don’t need these points for any aspect during your playthrough.

For some of these puzzles, you can get them wrong and still move forward with playing the game. There are some that are pivotal to the story and can’t be skipped over, but bonus or extra puzzles you find along the way can be passed over as long as you attempt it at least once. I made it a point to complete every puzzle I came across, because if you aren’t playing Layton for the puzzles, then I don’t know what you are playing it for.

So this begs the question posed at the start of the email as to whether or not I was a puzzle fraud, and the answer is a “no.” I was far from perfect, and there were at least 10 puzzles where I had to use 3 or 4 hint coins on in order to solve the puzzle, but a majority of the puzzles I was able to solve without the help of any hint coins. As my first foray into the Layton-verse, I was happy to see that I wasn’t a giant mess in solving puzzles, but there were far more “trick” puzzles than I was expecting. These are puzzles where the solution is “0” or to not do anything. You still get a word puzzle and instructions just like any other puzzle, but because our brains want to jump in and try to solve the problem in front of us, we solve for something when the answer was to not touch it. I will give an example, but I am doing this out of memory, so my wording may be off. “Little Joey wants the clock to read 12:00 but it is currently 4:15. What is the least amount of touches of the clock for Joey to make it 12:00?” or something like that. My initial thought of this puzzle was physically moving the hands, or using a mechanism to wind the clock so that it reflects the time that Joey wants it to be, but the answer is to not touch the clock at all, and it would eventually be 12:00. It makes sense, but the question would make it seem like you actually have to solve for something, when that is not the reality. There were other puzzles like that, but it was nothing egregious and once you know that there is a possibility of a trick puzzle out there, you are more inclined to see them when they pop up. The phrasing and the wording on the puzzles are super important to re-read because they might offer a little tell as to what the game wants you to think about. Of course if your brain is fried, or you are just not in the mood for puzzles, then some of these puzzles will feel like they are written in hieroglyphics.

There are a few things I forgot to mention about Lady Layton, such as being able to dress her up in different clothes (all child friendly), unlocking mini-games (more puzzles), and decorating your office but these are all just little asides that won’t eat up any of your time. It can be fun to see that the clothes you put on Katrielle or Sherl (dog assistant) will be there for any discussion scenes, but for obvious reasons they won’t be in the interstitial anime cutscenes that play sometimes during exciting moments of the cases. I made it a point to dress up Katrielle and Sherl in a different outfit for every case just for fun, but you could ignore it completely if you so choose.

As for the whole game, I enjoyed it and was surprised at how many puzzles were included. When I saw my hour count creep over the 15 hour cap it was certainly not what I was expecting, but I wasn’t disappointed that it happened. In fact playing this game, made me excited for the new Layton game that is supposedly coming out later that might actually promise a full 3D environment to explore, but I will worry what that means for the type of puzzles they are going to include. Lady Layton probably works best as a game that you might sit down and either complete half or 1 full case in each sitting, but give you time to recoup and get in the right state of mind before playing the game. I didn’t feel it was incredibly difficult or an unfair game, but there are puzzles that exist in the game that do not go easy on you. Obviously it’s a no brainer if you already like the Layton games, but I would recommend this game to people who like puzzle games or adventure games. It’s not quite the same thing as combining random objects in your inventory, but it itches that same part of your brain about solving weird puzzles that seem to come out of nowhere.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Sorry, no

Where does it rank: Lady Layton is a pretty good game and has lots of puzzles if you are so inclined to solve some puzzles. There are some puzzles and stories that just don't make sense, but I didn't play this game for realism. It did make me want to live in London, even though I know it won't look like this. I have it ranked as the The 62nd Greatest Video Game of All Time.It sits between 61 (super Dodgeball) and 63 (The Lost Vikings), this is out of a total of 161 games

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Mario Golf (n64) 2) The Magister 3) Sparkle 2

Great write-up! I bought this game when it came out on Switch and I don't know if this was done outside of Japan (I assume so) but there were real world charms you could buy that you could scan on your 3DS or Switch like an amiibo that would unlock outfits for Katrielle. My game came with one but I never opened it. Also, I think you can just unlock them in the game but I think those particular outfits might've cost a little more than the others. Needless to say those charms went to the clearance bin pretty quickly.

The Japanese release originally had TV/movie actors and actresses doing the voice overs but they used anime voice actors for the anime. Later, they released a DX version ofthe game that gave you the option to choose the anime voice actors if you preferred. Personally, I prefer the anime voice actors because alot of times when TV/movie actors do voice over roles I tend to notice it and I can't get the image of the actor doing their lines in front of a mic in a studio unlike a trained voice actor who is able to keep me in the world, so to speak.

@chamurai: thanks for the read and comment.. I don't think the charms were around for the switch US release because at least in this version you can just buy all the clothes right from the get go. Of course I could be wrong, because I obviously didn't play this day one.

But yeah I liked this game and I thought the anime voice cast did a good job with the characters. It has made me at least a little excited for the next layton coming out.