Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask
Apr. 15th, 2014 05:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroWelcome to Monte D’or, city of miracles! Unfortunately, the mysterious Masked Gentleman has begun terrorizing the town, and an old school friend of Professor Layton calls him in to solve the puzzle of the Mask of Chaos. “There is no puzzle without a solution,” indeed.
This is a good example of adding some new features but keeping the core gameplay intact: The point-and-click searching for puzzles and hint coins is slightly altered and the models and cutscenes are updated into 3D, but you’re still solving the same sort of brainteasers as usual and trailing along after a larger mystery. The biggest change is an entire chapter dedicated to a puzzle-filled dungeon crawl, which is full of rock-pushing puzzles and monster-dodging puzzles that are separate from your usual index. I wouldn’t want the entire game to play that way (it was middling for an rpg-style dungeon; the controls weren’t great and it went on a little too long) but it was a nice change of pace.
As the series has gone on, they’ve gotten very good at making sure that the unskippable puzzles are either fairly easy, impossible to fail, easy to brute-force a solution, or some combination thereof. In general, if you can’t solve most of the puzzles the game forces on you, you’ll never solve the optional ones and perhaps this isn’t the genre for you. (There also are a couple of exclusive story-only, non-index puzzles that start giving you hints if you fail them enough times, then basically spell out the solution for you.)
Though there is one unskippable puzzle that requires tilting the 3DS and using the motion sensor to cause blocks to slide. That feature isn’t actually necessary to the puzzle design and it’s never used again—it almost makes me wonder if it it’s a form of copy protection, because it’s unlikely that emulators will include that feature, and the game is unwinnable without completing that puzzle.
Mini-games include a toy robot (basically the model train or model car recurring game with some different rules), a pet rabbit theater (basically the picture book / puppet theater game), and a shopkeeper game (where you have to arrange the goods into a sequence of types and colors, which was my favorite of the lot). There’s also a horse-racing minigame that you play early on and then one of the townspeople presents instead of a puzzle.
(Also, they keep cramming more and more into each game—this one too 18+ hours to get through everything, which was longer than the main game of Last Specter without that game’s pack-in rpg. And there are 365 more downloadable puzzles on top of that!)
The puzzles get a bit repetitive when you’ve played all the games, and though they’ll come up with some new bits each time, there will always before some variant of a classic puzzle that irritates me. In this case, they brought back the peg-jumping puzzles with a new twist. (They didn’t overdo it with the Klotski puzzles at least. There were only a few, mostly solvable with a hint coin or two.)
Once you know the series tropes, it’s not hard to figure out a bunch of the twists before they happen. I figured out a bunch of the ending-reveal twists a few chapters earlier from the very heavy foreshadowing. And I knew the solution to one of the “dark miracles” right after it happened, because it was basically the same twist as a major reveal in Unwound Future. For that matter, the fact that there were explanations to the dark miracles at all, which would only be a surprise if this was your very first exposure to the series: Though there’s typically some very advanced steampunk tech, perfect disguises and Luke’s ability to talk to animals, there is no “magic”. Everything presented as magic has always been revealed to be either a clever deception or advanced technology, or both.
The end is a bit overdone, as the characters bend over backwards to make everyone feel happy and accepted. I think they were trying too hard to make it a happy ending given the setup they presented, and it (amazingly) strained my disbelief given the way earlier facts and characters had been shown. (Which is annoying because they so heavily used flashbacks: They could have foreshadowed the ending much better just by giving us a little more detail on certain relationships earlier.)
And speaking of the flashbacks: Man, Hershel just can’t catch a break, can he? His school days ended in tragedy, and then his early days of professorship did as well (as seen in Unwound Future). Presumably the sixth game will focus more on the Azran civilization and the mysterious antagonists of the fourth and fifth games and less on Layton’s personal history, but if they keep the series going into a third trilogy, are we going to see the mysterious tragedy that haunted Layton from early childhood, too?
Overall: A solid game in the ongoing series; you’ll like it if you’ve liked the others.
This is a good example of adding some new features but keeping the core gameplay intact: The point-and-click searching for puzzles and hint coins is slightly altered and the models and cutscenes are updated into 3D, but you’re still solving the same sort of brainteasers as usual and trailing along after a larger mystery. The biggest change is an entire chapter dedicated to a puzzle-filled dungeon crawl, which is full of rock-pushing puzzles and monster-dodging puzzles that are separate from your usual index. I wouldn’t want the entire game to play that way (it was middling for an rpg-style dungeon; the controls weren’t great and it went on a little too long) but it was a nice change of pace.
As the series has gone on, they’ve gotten very good at making sure that the unskippable puzzles are either fairly easy, impossible to fail, easy to brute-force a solution, or some combination thereof. In general, if you can’t solve most of the puzzles the game forces on you, you’ll never solve the optional ones and perhaps this isn’t the genre for you. (There also are a couple of exclusive story-only, non-index puzzles that start giving you hints if you fail them enough times, then basically spell out the solution for you.)
Though there is one unskippable puzzle that requires tilting the 3DS and using the motion sensor to cause blocks to slide. That feature isn’t actually necessary to the puzzle design and it’s never used again—it almost makes me wonder if it it’s a form of copy protection, because it’s unlikely that emulators will include that feature, and the game is unwinnable without completing that puzzle.
Mini-games include a toy robot (basically the model train or model car recurring game with some different rules), a pet rabbit theater (basically the picture book / puppet theater game), and a shopkeeper game (where you have to arrange the goods into a sequence of types and colors, which was my favorite of the lot). There’s also a horse-racing minigame that you play early on and then one of the townspeople presents instead of a puzzle.
(Also, they keep cramming more and more into each game—this one too 18+ hours to get through everything, which was longer than the main game of Last Specter without that game’s pack-in rpg. And there are 365 more downloadable puzzles on top of that!)
The puzzles get a bit repetitive when you’ve played all the games, and though they’ll come up with some new bits each time, there will always before some variant of a classic puzzle that irritates me. In this case, they brought back the peg-jumping puzzles with a new twist. (They didn’t overdo it with the Klotski puzzles at least. There were only a few, mostly solvable with a hint coin or two.)
Once you know the series tropes, it’s not hard to figure out a bunch of the twists before they happen. I figured out a bunch of the ending-reveal twists a few chapters earlier from the very heavy foreshadowing. And I knew the solution to one of the “dark miracles” right after it happened, because it was basically the same twist as a major reveal in Unwound Future. For that matter, the fact that there were explanations to the dark miracles at all, which would only be a surprise if this was your very first exposure to the series: Though there’s typically some very advanced steampunk tech, perfect disguises and Luke’s ability to talk to animals, there is no “magic”. Everything presented as magic has always been revealed to be either a clever deception or advanced technology, or both.
The end is a bit overdone, as the characters bend over backwards to make everyone feel happy and accepted. I think they were trying too hard to make it a happy ending given the setup they presented, and it (amazingly) strained my disbelief given the way earlier facts and characters had been shown. (Which is annoying because they so heavily used flashbacks: They could have foreshadowed the ending much better just by giving us a little more detail on certain relationships earlier.)
And speaking of the flashbacks: Man, Hershel just can’t catch a break, can he? His school days ended in tragedy, and then his early days of professorship did as well (as seen in Unwound Future). Presumably the sixth game will focus more on the Azran civilization and the mysterious antagonists of the fourth and fifth games and less on Layton’s personal history, but if they keep the series going into a third trilogy, are we going to see the mysterious tragedy that haunted Layton from early childhood, too?
Overall: A solid game in the ongoing series; you’ll like it if you’ve liked the others.
