Hands-On: Professor Layton

November 8th, 2006, 02:07 Posted By: wraggster

Via IGN

If you found yourself disappointed when Level 5's first DS game had a professor's name attached to it, you weren't alone. The DS could use an epic with the scale of Dragon Quest VIII, Rogue Galaxy or the upcoming White Knight Story, after all, and who better to deliver it than the maker of those three titles.

We're not sure if it will end up being an adventure to rival those three, but Level 5's Professor Layton and the Mysterious Town looks like another quality DS title in its own right. We sampled an early build at the Nintendo World event in Nagoya this past weekend.

The focus of this game is on solving puzzles, so we'll start there. The game presents its puzzles in a straightforward way. The top screen usually lists a problem with text, with the bottom screen allowing you to solve the problem directly with the stylus. Here are a few examples that we saw at the event:

1. Given three flasks, measure out an exact amount of water ala Die Hard with a Vengeance.

2. Given a set of 10 coins in a triangle formation, flip the triangle over by moving just three coins.

3. Given a map with the letters A, B, C and D appearing twice each, connect A to A, B to B, C to C and D to D without any intersections between the lines.

We didn't have trouble solving the few puzzles that we sampled, although we did notice a few people chicken out and flee from the waiting line to play the game. If you do end up having trouble (and we presume there will be tougher problems in the full game), you can always ask for a hint, assuming you've built up enough hint points.

Different from the billion other puzzle and quiz based DS games, Layton has an adventure mode, with lots of text boxes and catchy character and background art. You move between the puzzles by selecting locations on a town map. In the demo version, the map indicated that we had 10 out of 11 puzzles remaining to be cleared.

There probably won't be any random battles or interstellar travel in Professor Layton, but intriguing puzzles and gorgeous art could make this another DS pick-up. We'll let you know how everything comes together when the game sees Japanese release next year. A US version has yet to be announced.

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