Alright, so as I said already I’m terrible at puzzles so I’ve decided to go outside my comfort zone and play the latest installment in the Professor Layton series, Layton’s Mystery Journey on Switch. Let me know what you’ve thought of the game in the comments and as always, hit the subscribe button to get notified of all the future content I have coming. It’s a new year and that means a ton of new games and videos coming, along with a few other new ideas I hope you’ll enjoy.

Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires’ Conspiracy, focuses not on Professor Layton himself this time around as it did in previous games, but this time on his daughter Katrielle. Turns out the good Professor has gone missing and Katrielle opens up her detective agency to not only solve various smaller cases throughout London but also hopes to find her dad as well. She’s joined by her assistant Ernest, and a talking dog she names Sherl. The game’s characters are all upbeat and likable. Something here that bugs me but isn’t surprising is that Katrielle is the typical “gumshoe” detective that has no real credentials but somehow she always solves the case before the bumbling and incompetent actual police detective.

The graphics looks great – very colorful and the animated cutscenes are fun to watch. The game was developed by Level 5, so the art style reminds me a lot of Ni No Kuni. They’re a weird mix of this European setting but then sometimes the characters still over-emote like you’re watching an anime. The whole setting is a mix of styles – like the game appears to take place in a modern London but but there’s still older technologies that are used. So for the first few cases I’m thinking it’s in an older time period due to the clothing but then I realized they have electricity and movies and such. I think that’s pretty cool and it reminds me of how that was done in Batman: The Animated Series also.

So the game’s separated into various cases you solve and has a few different phases you’ll progress through to complete each one. There’s basically an animated but mostly static image you’ll use your magnifying glass on to select or tap things on the screen to collect clues or other items, interview people, or cycle through the menus. You’ll also encounter lots of puzzles in order to not only raise your overall score but also to progress through the story. These puzzles range from being simple brainteasers, to logic puzzles, to some being riddles. The amount of points you get for each one also indicates the difficulty. It’ll range from a 25 point puzzle that unless you’re me, you should be able to solve really easily, to these more difficult ones that you’ll want to make use of a notepad or even the little markup tools you’ve got available in the game itself. I did find that while the puzzles were all different, that it was pretty common to see one along the lines of “destroy all the aliens on the grid with just 4 shots” or “feed all the fish with just 3 pieces of bait” or something similar. But basically you’ll search areas, interview people, do some puzzles, then once you collect all the clues you’ll crack the case.

You mileage may vary on this but there’s a TON of dialogue in this. Most of it is useless banter as well, which is easier to listen to than it is to read. Not that reading is hard – I graduated from public school and am proud to read at a 3rd grade level – but I’d rather hear this interaction with the characters and feel like they’re coming to life on the screen instead of having to tap A every couple lines. That’s my complaint with games like Disgaea and Neptunia as well. Witty writing and banter are fun but they need to lead somewhere eventually. Do it for too long and your audience’s eyes will glaze over – not unlike the looks I get when I drone on too long.

I was disappointed at how linear the game felt at times. Like for a game that wants you to search and investigate things, you’re basically lead by the nose to each screen you need to be at, it keeps a tally of how many other clues you need to pick up at the time, and then it tells you where to go next and who to talk to. And the game starts off REALLY slowly. Like they explain EVERYTHING through that first case. Maybe the developers just wanted you to focus more on the fun of research and not trying to really wrack your brain figuring out where to go next, but it would’ve been nice to feel like I was actually the one figuring things out and not just being told “we need to go to the river next!” and then being told “hey moron, go to the river.” That said there’s basically no point in going to any previous sections of the map unless you’re trying to poke at objects to unlock more puzzles.

You can download daily puzzles, cook things for characters you meet and try to impress them, run a retail store which is lot less of a nightmare than in real life, and also play a minigame where you’re helping Sherl escape the pound.

Just a side note on the map as well – the default is to walk to each location until the game tells you to bicycle there. But Everything looks like it’s within the same block. What the heck is the point of making them use a bicycle? There’s no load times or walk times or anything like that being calculated, so what does it matter if I make them walk there instead of cycling? There’s no benefit.

So other than puzzles, you’ve got some other things you can do if you want a break. You can download daily puzzles, cook things for characters you meet and try to impress them, run a retail store which is lot less of a nightmare than in real life, and also play a minigame where you’re helping Sherl escape the pound. Which considering he’s the character who gets all the trash talking one liners and sassy comebacks, I’m not surprised he ended up there to begin with, because someone probably put him there.

So there’s a lot of content here to keep you busy in between cases or even after you beat the game. The stories told here are good and lighthearted, the characters are enjoyable, and the puzzles can be challenging. One last critique I have is that this game really is meant to play in handheld mode. And that shouldn’t be surprising because this all started as a DS series. Using the analog to get around is a chore and giving it more than a small nudge will take the speed of the curser from slow to ludicrous speed instantly. That aside if you want something with a decent story and puzzles to mess around with, I think this is worth the time.