Professor Layton and the Spectre's Call review

Made2Game Professor Layton And The Spectre’s Call review score: 6 out of 10
Formats: Nintendo DS
Format Reviewed: Nintendo DS
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Level 5

Four games in and I can safely say I think I’m done with the Professor Layton series. It’s not that I don’t like the games, because I do – they’re practically a match made in heaven for me thanks to the adventure/puzzle mixture they offer, while the quirky art style is right up my street. But having solved every puzzle and unravelled every mystery that’s been thrown at the professor’s feet so far, I get the distinct feeling that Nintendo’s ‘brain training for gamers’ has run out of steam. And why? Probably because I think I’ve just completed the same game four times over.

Okay, so maybe that’s a slight simplification of the truth: there are different stories, different characters and, most importantly, different puzzles. Or are there? Having similar but slightly tougher variations of the same puzzle in a single game – like, for example, the ‘place the queens’ chess puzzle from Professor Layton And The Curious Village – isn’t great, but at least it works from a continuity point of view. Place all four games in the series next to one another, however, and a lack of variation becomes far easier to see. And for me, it’s that lack of originality that’s worn the series down.

What would a Professor Layton game be without slide puzzles? A bit different to all the other Layton games, if we’re honest – this one has several.

Of course, that wouldn’t mean anything if you haven’t played a Professor Layton game before and it’s fair to say that if you’re a Layton virgin, Professor Layton and the Spectre’s Call is still a decent example of the series. Decent, yes, but definitely not the best… and that’s not just because so few of the puzzles are unlike anything we’ve seen before.

The missing link
As pretentious and artsy as it sounds, one of the things that made Professor Layton so appealing when it first arrived was its subtle use of charm and whimsy to draw you into the world. The art style was unique and genuinely beautiful; the music was melodic and set the atmosphere perfectly; the characters were quirky and a little bit funny, but without falling totally into comedy and making a mockery of the whole thing. But most importantly for me, the story of Curious Village was simply delightful – it had twists that were clever but not impossible to work out, a solid ending that made sense and, most importantly, hints of danger without anything that seemed too out of place. Well, not unless you count Don Paulo with his amazing/ridiculous disguises and slapstick hatred of Layton, that is.

As time’s gone on though, I can’t help but feel that the series has lost some of that. For one, you’ve seen the introduction of villains; real, ill-meaning, ‘I want to conquer the world and I’ll destroy everyone to get it’ bad guys who make up for their lack of empathy and charm by just being… well, bastards. Sure, I can understand the thinking that every good mystery needs someone or something behind it, but Curious Village proved it doesn’t have to be villainy. It just feels like a compromise that Level-5 didn’t have to make, but did anyway just to make the masses feel more comfortable with the stories.

If only every crime these days could be cracked by solving puzzles, eh? Although we doubt you can clear a solitaire board with pepper spray and rubber bullets.

And then you’ve got the twists, which have evolved into ridiculously sweeping game-changers that almost send the whole tale flying off the rails. It’s bad enough that they’ve become almost impossible to predict (which, for me, ruins a major part of any mystery-based adventure, since half the fun is working things out for yourself), but it’s almost laughable and incredibly jarring how Layton himself goes from umming and ahhing to giving a detailed explanation of the entire mystery in the blink of an eye. Yes, so he’s meant to be incredibly smart but when he’s making massive leaps in logic that the player themselves could never had considered possible, it makes a mockery of what you’ve been working towards.

(On the plus side, Spectre’s Call does at least introduce Hotel Dusk-style deduction reminders where you need to pick the right answer to key mystery-related questions, but it’s nowhere near enough to make up for the whopping twists that really make no sense right up until the last minute… and maybe not even after that.)

There are other issues too, but they’re ones that seem more obvious in Spectre’s Call than they have in previous games. Things like the characters being less interesting and more generic (the fat washer woman, the deaf old man, the slightly clueless police officers) or the setting being a slightly faceless town that doesn’t ooze the charisma and fascination of Curious Village’s… er, curious village or the mysterious underground world of Pandora’s Box. And if anything, packing Spectre’s Call with extras only serves to make it feel rather cluttered, instead of bulging with content as Level-5 probably intended.

He’s right you know… if only because you won’t be allowed past certain points in the game unless you’ve completed a certain number of puzzles.

Too many puzzles spoil the broth
Previous Layton games may have had added elements to distract you along the way, but Spectre’s Call almost goes too far. You’ve got three very different mini-game puzzles – creating toy train tracks, making fish collect coins in a tank and having marionettes act out plays using specific verbs – that each have multiple stages and can unlock the usual sets of harder bonus puzzles, just like in earlier games. But then there’s other stuff too that feels tacked on with no real purpose. The episodes (read: additional cutscenes) aren’t so bad as they help fill in story blanks, even where there aren’t any. Collecting mouse medals though? Seemingly pointless. The Mouse Alley mini-game that appears once you’ve got ten of them, even though that’s never explained? Boring. And as for the collection of unique objects hidden around the place… well, there’s totally pointless for you.

The thing is, Nintendo had the chance to put some truly interesting bonus content into Spectre’s Call – specifically, the London Life adventure that sits apart from the main game and might as well be called Layton Crossing, given that it’s basically Animal Crossing set in a unique Layton-esque world – but they dropped it for the European version. I’m guessing that’s because of its rigid ‘everything must be translated into five languages’ policy, as the amount of text requiring translation would be insane. But while it’s possible to have the attitude of not missing what you’ve never seen, it’s also a massive shame to see something so deep get passed by. If there was ever an excuse to import the US version of a game, this is it.

Another one that might seem familiar; last time, it was pigs in pens, this time it’s different coloured fish that don’t get on with one another. Oh well…

But then, should you bother? I mean, Spectre’s Call is far from a bad game as I already said, but that doesn’t make it a great one either. If you’ve played all the previous Layton games then you’ll probably feel obliged to play this one, but I’d say you should brace yourself for a bit of disappointment (especially since it’s not even that hard a game either). And if you haven’t played Layton before, I’d suggest going back to where it all began and picking up Curious Village instead – it’s a far more magical experience, one that make you feel both clever and happy at the same time. Spectre’s Call might manage the former but, thanks to a real downer of an ending, probably not the latter.

And so I repeat my original statement: thanks to Spectre’s Call, I think I’m done with the Professor Layton series. Or at least, I am until Professor Layton And The Mask Of Miracles arrives on 3DS, as it’ll be interesting to see what they can do with 3D to make the puzzles more interesting. And I’m done until Nintendo gets around to releasing the animated movie over here on DVD. And I’m done until I do something really dumb, requiring me to play a game that makes me feel a tiny bit smart again…

Hey, who am I kidding? I’ll never be done. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a man in a top hat.

 

Words by Martin Mathers (Twitter: @majordysentry)

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