Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box Review
Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box
DS Nintendo game reviews
“clever puzzles, interesting areas to explore, thrilling mystery to unravel.”
Pros : 150+ puzzles to solve, story, adventure, and brainteasers.
Cons : Hints aren’t always helpful.
Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box is the second game in the Professor Layton series created mostly by Level-5′s puzzle-obsessed Akihiro Hino.
Like the other games, the plot of Diabolical Box is driven by the Professor’s need to solve an overarching mystery – this time around, it’s the death of his friend and mentor. Accompanied by his protégé, Luke, the Professor sets off on a train ride that takes them to a charming countryside village and later to a strange and sinister town with a vampire problem.
The new game finds Layton and Luke on the trail of the Elysian Box, the antique referenced in the title that’s said to instantly kill anyone who opens it. After the professor’s old mentor falls victim to the box–or some other kind of foul play–the pair sets off on a luxury train line called the Molentary Express on a cross-country pursuit of both the item and some real answers. By contrast, the Curious Village was set entirely in the odd, eponymous hamlet of St. Mystere, and you as the player spent so much time confined there, covering the same ground and plumbing the town’s mysteries that I felt like the Curious Village itself almost became a character or active participant in the story. Consequently, the story in this sequel initially felt a little disjointed to me, since you spend a comparatively short time in each location as you ride the train and explore the places where it stops.
But the Molentary Express is just the beginning here, and it’s not long before the story takes a turn for the surreal (and slightly macabre) and begins to take on an identity of its own, especially as the train deposits you in eerie, unexplained areas. Numerous references to the first game and some neat reappearances by its characters help ground this game’s storyline in the familiar, too. And though I wasn’t counting minutes or lines, I’d swear The Diabolical Box has a little more spoken dialogue and animated video sequences to flesh out its story than The Curious Village did.
For those new to the series, the game relies on critical thinking, intuition, and logic to move forward, in lieu of timed button presses or other sections that require good hand-eye coordination. You work your way through a progressively difficult gauntlet of puzzles; some of them relate directly to the story (like searching for possible escape routes a murderer may have taken), while others are random, contextless puzzles presented by the game’s eccentric townsfolk (like moving a stack of pancakes from one plate to another, but keeping the biggest on the bottom).
There are a few minigames available in the professor’s suitcase, but some of them are a bit more involved this time around. One of them tasks you with working a fat hamster back into shape; you do this by collecting various items with different properties and laying them out on a grid to make the chubby little rodent run the pounds off. There’s also a wholly setting-appropriate tea-making system where you collect different sorts of tea leaves and experiment with blending them into different kinds of teas, which can have some minor effects on Layton, Luke, and a few of the people you meet. There’s a collection mechanic at work here that may give you something else to focus on besides pursuing your next lead, though I never felt myself completely distracted by the minigames from the task at hand.
The real success of the Professor Layton series is the way its puzzle-solving and crime-solving aspects support and blend with one another. Alone, the two halves would respectively make for a decent minigame collection and dialogue-driven adventure game. But together they create a wonderful mixture of narrative intrigue and head-scratching puzzle gameplay that propels itself forward straight through to the end of the story. Every time you hit a slow period in your investigation, you’ll be excited to have some new puzzles to solve–and every time you’re feeling the mental fatigue of puzzling your way through them, you’ll be glad to reveal another piece of the mystery. That mix is in full effect in Diabolical Box, and while the charm and satisfaction of playing Layton may be a little less of a surprise the second time around, it’s still plenty worth coming back for.
Gamespot Score : 8.5
IGN Score : 8.5
Available at Amazon.com
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