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New 'Professor Layton' title offers more great mind games

New 'Professor Layton' title offers more great mind games

By Seth Schiesel New York Times News Service

Every game, of the video variety or not, makes you think. But not every game is explicitly about puzzles. If you find thinking fun and you like puzzles, and if you aren't totally flummoxed by portable electronics, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box is 2009's game for you.

The new Layton game, published by Nintendo for its pocket-size DS machine, is the sequel to last year's sleeper hit Professor Layton and the Curious Village. But there is no need to have played the earlier game first. If anything, Diabolical Box is even more polished than its predecessor.

At the heart of the new Layton are more than 150 puzzles and mind-benders. They range from mazes to movable-block puzzles, pattern-recognition games and all sorts of analytical brain teasers that defy ready categorization. For instance, one set of puzzles late in the game requires you to light the intersecting paths in a forest using as few lamps as possible.

Creative thinking and imagination are vital here. In one of my favorite puzzles, a professional golfer can putt the ball only in distances of 3, 5, 7 and 11 feet. If he is 20 feet from the hole, what is the fewest number of strokes he needs to sink it? (The answer is not four.)

What you will not find in Diabolical Box are many language puzzles or riddles. That is because the game's puzzle master is Akira Tago, a professor emeritus at Chiba University in Japan and author of the Japanese best-selling Head Gymnastics series of puzzle books. Layton, quite wisely, is built around puzzles that are not culture- or language-dependent, so it can be appreciated by people around the world.

Of course, the worst thing any game can do is frustrate players so much that they stop playing. That usually happens when game designers fall into the trap of trying to demonstrate that they are smarter than their customers. Diabolical Box never trips that snare. Its puzzles are certainly challenging, but even the most difficult in the main story line end up well short of GRE or LSAT caliber. (Some of the optional puzzles unlocked at the end, however, will test just about anyone.) Moreover, each puzzle comes with three successively more explicit hints that you can buy with coins discovered throughout the game.

It took me 121/2 hours of solid playtime to finish the main story, at the end of which I had solved 99 puzzles (you don't have to discover or solve every single problem to complete the story). That worked out to about one puzzle every 71/2 minutes, which felt like an almost perfect pace.

And this is not a puzzle book — not a simple collection of quizzes devoid of any narrative context or meaning. Diabolical Box, set in Victorian Britain, follows a mystery populated by dozens of characters. The plot might be thin and a bit trite at the beginning, but it ends with a gorgeous, emotionally captivating love story. This is one puzzle game that might just bring tears to your eyes, as it did mine.