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Professor Layton and the Last Specter
The town of Misthallery is being terrorized by a mysterious specter! Professor Hershel “A gentleman leaves no puzzle unsolved” Layton to the rescue!
It’s a prequel to the first trilogy which, among other things, shows how Layton and Luke first met. Emmy, the professor’s assistant in this game, is pretty damn awesome. She solves several non-puzzle-related problems with roundhouse kicks. Oh, and they’ve given up on coming up with excuses for why everyone you meet has puzzles for you to solve. Apparently that’s just a thing in this world.
The “story advancement” puzzles are set up as separate from the standard puzzle index, including not going to the usual screen. They don’t earn picrats and they seem to be a bit easier to blunder through, even if you don’t know what you’re doing. (They’re mostly multiple choice “put the clues together” bits.) They’re also better in this game than previous ones about making puzzles that you need to do to advance the plot either easier to solve or easier to brute-force guess.
That said, I feel like the puzzles edge harder overall with every iteration of the series. The hardest puzzles are definitely a bit more front-loaded than in the first couple of games, and in general are a bit trickier. Some of the logic puzzles have more of a “moon logic” nature to them, probably because they’ve run out of the classic ones. (Though new variations of “rowing across the river”, peg-jumping, mazes, sliding blocks and puzzle pieces all appear.) I was actually rather annoyed when I tried the post-game bonus puzzles—more than half of them were variations on sliding-block puzzles.
Mini-games include a model train (basically the model car from the last game with some different rules), a coin-collecting fish tank (basically the parrot deliveries from the last game with different rules), and a puppet theater (basically the picture book from the last game with different rules). There’s also a mouse-catching minigame one of the townspeople presents instead of a puzzle.
It also comes with a pack-in rpg “London Life”, which is like a more numbers-heavy Animal Crossing. (I’m biased towards it because it’s made by Brownie Brown, and I’m apparently their biggest fan.) You’ve just moved to Layton’s London, and need to earn Wealth and acquire Happiness by doing fetch quests and buying things. Your clothes make you Cooler (easier to avoid Happiness-draining attacks) and more Formal (you can enter the high-end stores). The interface and art style reminds me a lot of Earthbound. The plot isn’t really noteworthy.
I think I’d put this game behind Unwound Future overall—I felt that game had a stronger plot and more interesting character development (particularly for Layton himself), the puzzles overall felt a bit stronger, and the minigames were comparable. This game has a bit of an edge on total playtime (particularly when you factor in London Life), but that’s only important if you care very highly about the hours of play/cost of game ratio.
Overall: If you liked the others, you’ll like this one too. There’s nothing in the main game that sets it apart from the first three. It’s not worth buying just for London Life, but that makes a nice several-hour bonus game which you’ll enjoy if you like Animal Crossing and similar “sidequests without the actual quest” games.
It’s a prequel to the first trilogy which, among other things, shows how Layton and Luke first met. Emmy, the professor’s assistant in this game, is pretty damn awesome. She solves several non-puzzle-related problems with roundhouse kicks. Oh, and they’ve given up on coming up with excuses for why everyone you meet has puzzles for you to solve. Apparently that’s just a thing in this world.
The “story advancement” puzzles are set up as separate from the standard puzzle index, including not going to the usual screen. They don’t earn picrats and they seem to be a bit easier to blunder through, even if you don’t know what you’re doing. (They’re mostly multiple choice “put the clues together” bits.) They’re also better in this game than previous ones about making puzzles that you need to do to advance the plot either easier to solve or easier to brute-force guess.
That said, I feel like the puzzles edge harder overall with every iteration of the series. The hardest puzzles are definitely a bit more front-loaded than in the first couple of games, and in general are a bit trickier. Some of the logic puzzles have more of a “moon logic” nature to them, probably because they’ve run out of the classic ones. (Though new variations of “rowing across the river”, peg-jumping, mazes, sliding blocks and puzzle pieces all appear.) I was actually rather annoyed when I tried the post-game bonus puzzles—more than half of them were variations on sliding-block puzzles.
Mini-games include a model train (basically the model car from the last game with some different rules), a coin-collecting fish tank (basically the parrot deliveries from the last game with different rules), and a puppet theater (basically the picture book from the last game with different rules). There’s also a mouse-catching minigame one of the townspeople presents instead of a puzzle.
It also comes with a pack-in rpg “London Life”, which is like a more numbers-heavy Animal Crossing. (I’m biased towards it because it’s made by Brownie Brown, and I’m apparently their biggest fan.) You’ve just moved to Layton’s London, and need to earn Wealth and acquire Happiness by doing fetch quests and buying things. Your clothes make you Cooler (easier to avoid Happiness-draining attacks) and more Formal (you can enter the high-end stores). The interface and art style reminds me a lot of Earthbound. The plot isn’t really noteworthy.
I think I’d put this game behind Unwound Future overall—I felt that game had a stronger plot and more interesting character development (particularly for Layton himself), the puzzles overall felt a bit stronger, and the minigames were comparable. This game has a bit of an edge on total playtime (particularly when you factor in London Life), but that’s only important if you care very highly about the hours of play/cost of game ratio.
Overall: If you liked the others, you’ll like this one too. There’s nothing in the main game that sets it apart from the first three. It’s not worth buying just for London Life, but that makes a nice several-hour bonus game which you’ll enjoy if you like Animal Crossing and similar “sidequests without the actual quest” games.