Professor Layton & Pandora’s Box Review
The Professor's back, and this time he means business
By Ben Salter
Professor Layton is back in his second western release Professor Layton & Pandora’s Box. Fans of The Curious Village have no doubt been highly anticipating the chance to have another crack at the professor’s brainteasers for the past year and a half. While the series has been an overwhelming success in Japan, it is still trying to find a break in the English speaking markets. For those who didn’t play the first game, it is essentially a series of puzzles that’ll have you racking your brain using maths and linguistic skills, along with intuition and logic to find the solution.
Professor Layton & Pandora’s Box, or And the Diabolical Box as it’s known in the US, is a sequel but doesn’t follow on directly from its predecessor. In fact there’s no need to play Curious Village at all, as the story is crafted as a game in its own right. We are informed that a mysterious item – the Elysian Box – is responsible for the death of one of the professor’s dearest friends. Layton and his slightly annoying sidekick, Luke, set off on a journey around Europe to discover more about the strange item, as any good archeologists would. From here the story gets more obscure, and really completely pointless. You’ll find yourself investigating murders, finding lost children and getting involved in trivial problems that the locals seem to find extremely important. As you progress further the main storyline begins to make less sense, and almost starts to become irrelevant. Fortunately it pretty much is, as the puzzles and gameplay is what Professor Layton is all about.
Professor Layton & Pandora’s Box is set-up like a good ol’ fashion point and click adventure. You walk around - that is to say you are presented with a stationary scene from a first person perspective, and click on items of interest with your stylus moving from area to area. The Professor and Luke are presented with puzzles either through running into an important character, finding a local in a predicament, or simply reminiscing about something and challenging the other with a puzzle to fill in time. All in all there are 150 puzzles in a campaign that’ll take you roughly around 10 hours to complete if you race through it. Many of these are side quests, and not required to progress, so the game could easily take up to 15 hours if you want to walk away with a prefect record.
Pandora’s Box expands upon the puzzles in The Curious Village by offering a greater variety of brainteasers. They’ll have you rearranging items, solving maths problems and using logic to determine what has happened in a strange scenario, just to mention a few. During your journey you’ll come across hint coins; these can be exchanged for up to three clues on most puzzles, which can be invaluable when you can’t quite figure out what to do. Most of the main quests will require you to submit a numeric answer, rearrange a puzzle, or pick something from within the scene. Many of the side quests, or puzzles you may stumble across but need not finish, are multiple-choice leaving you with the option to have a crack at it if all else fails.
Unfortunately the difficulty curve is far from prefect, and holds Professor Layton & Pandora’s Box back from being something really special. You’ll solve a rather easy problem in seconds, and then be thrown a complete brain bender minutes later. While the game itself is meant to be challenging, there just doesn’t seem to be any consistency in the difficulty between puzzles. It’s far from being a make or break situation; as I say the puzzles are designed to give your problem solving skills a work out, it just doesn’t quite flow as well as we’re used to in this day and age of games becoming progressively more difficult. In saying that, the puzzles towards the end of the game are the ones that’ll have you throwing your DS at the wall in a fit of rage.
Throughout the adventure you’ll acquire a range of interesting items that act as mini-games, which inturn are ongoing puzzles. Towards the beginning of the game, for example, you’ll take custody of a rather cubby hamster. While searching European villages Luke and the Professor will be rewarded with various items for the Hamster to use. From here you have to choose the right items to get the Hamster motivated to exercise and lose weight. Another ongoing puzzle will have you reassembling a camera. These are easy to forget about, until you stumble across another item to use with them, but they’re a nice addition to the main quest. They also help to break up the normal puzzles, as while there is a large range of variations you’ll stumble across a few of the same problems with a new skin. For the most part these are spaced out far enough for you not to (really) notice. The end result is 10 or so hours of great puzzle solving. Fortunately the game ends just in time, as any longer and the repetition would have started to become noticeable.
The touch screen controls are some of the best on the Nintendo DS. The point-and-click genre is unfortunately a dying breed. It’s a shame because the DS is almost the perfect platform, so it’s great that developer, Level 5, have managed to craft it into a puzzle game. The handwriting recognition is fantastic; most of the puzzles will ask you to write something (generally a number) and the game recognises it accurately almost, if not, 100% of the time. The memo function is something you’ll become all too familiar with as you progress to some of the more difficult puzzles. It overlays a semi-transparent canvas over the puzzle so you can jot things down, and even practice sketching something over the actual puzzle to help you solve it visually.
The fantastic artwork, great animated cut-scenes, and decent voice acting make Pandora’s Box one of the best games on DS to sit back and watch. Unfortunately Level 5 did hit some size restrictions, which forced them to use the full anime-style cinematics sparingly. The rest of the game uses a more traditional stationary head and scrolling text system, although, kudos must be given for the continued use of voiceovers.
The Final Verdict
Professor Layton & Pandora’s Box transforms your DS into a collection of brain-testing puzzles. You’ll be faced with many a conundrum, as this is by no means an easy game. Almost every puzzle will test you, some will frustrate you, and some will reward your hard effort, but most importantly you’ll want to keep playing. With anywhere between 10-15 hours of gameplay, depending on how many of the 150 puzzles you complete, Professor Layton & Pandora’s Box is a must for anyone looking for a challenging, but rewarding, puzzle game.
Gameplay
8.5/10
Great puzzles, decent variety, challenging & the controls are some of the best on the DS, but the difficulty curve is just a little off - holding it back from being something really special.
Graphics
9.5/10
Awesome animated cinematics. The 2D graphics throughout the point-and-click adventure inspired world are also a joy to look at.
Sound
8.5/10
Voice acting is great, especially for a DS game, and a nice soundtrack.
Value
9.0/10
The prefect length, up to 15 hours is great for a DS and a puzzle game; any longer and it would begin to feel repetitive. There’s no real reason to go back and do it again, but you won’t really want to.
Overall
8.7/10
Submitted by ICC_06
27/09/2009
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