Thanks for a great excuse to revisit a game series this weekend that was such a beautiful and rewarding part of my childhood. I have so many fond memories of playing the Professor Layton series of mystery puzzle games with my dad – I often reminisce the dangerous hints of tension while solving a tricky puzzle, catching clever villains, and once even narrowly escaping their attempts to crush you with a Ferris wheel when you’re close to unraveling their secret!
This weekend I bought the latest installment in this series, Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires’ Conspiracy developed by Level-5, with Akihiro Hino as the director and writer. Originally released on iOS, Android and Nintendo 3DS in 2017, it was later enhanced and released on the Nintendo Switch in 2019 which is the medium I chose for my play test. It’s targeted at puzzle game enthusiasts and fans of mystery and adventure games. It’s supposed to appeal to younger and older players who enjoy story-driven gameplay and brain-teasing puzzles.
I argue that this game fails to engender the types of fun like challenge, discovery, and expression that fans have come to expect from the mechanics of puzzle-solving, exploration, and a tense narrative the Professor Layton series is known for. The puzzles in this game frankly feel too easy and disconnected from a wider narrative, and the extensive exposition through dialogue and cut-scenes often undermines the simplicity, charm, and player-agency of the original games. Based on reviews of the games I’ve seen, dissatisfaction with the game was widespread and probably why another Professor Layton game hasn’t been released since 2017. (DAMN! Shoulda re-played the originals instead!) Despite the sadness I feel seeing the decline of this great series, I think it provides compelling insights as a game designer into how you can torch a mystery game if you’re not careful: specifically, if you lose sight of the central mechanics that are truly driving the dynamics and intrigue of your game. Before this critical play, I would’ve assumed that the emergent properties of mystery and tension are produced solely by narrative and exist separately from the puzzle-solving mechanics that primarily keep your mind occupied, but I now appreciate that mechanics must complement the overarching narrative to achieve the desired player effects and buy-in.
Let’s get in to the drop in difficulty, which fascinatingly not only occurs because of the puzzle itself, but also because the narrative didn’t feel connected to the puzzle at hand. Unlike previous games in the series that had a large-overarching narrative arcs, that added tension and urgency to the puzzle solving, the puzzles in Layton’s Mystery Journey were largely unrelated to the story and rather parts of repetitive, self-contained narrative loops with little variation in game-play; the story was episodic, confined to small, self-contained stories with less build-up and payoff than a more interconnected narrative I was expecting. This design choice discourages players from delving deeply into a larger, more complex world, and makes the puzzle-solving feel entirely removed from the cut-scenes happening in between.
To provide just one example, there’s a scene where the players interact with a villain Emiliana, and engage her in a confrontational conversation. Then, right as the tea is getting juicy, we cut to a random (pretty easy) logic puzzle involving little smurf looking guys who aren’t related to the story at hand. Then after solving it, we go back to the chat. This is basically what happens the whole game and it really takes you out of whatever story they are going for. My suggestion for improvement would be that the puzzle being solved is actually related to the mystery at hand, for example, noticing an idiosyncrasy on Emiliana’s watch or something like that.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that the tone and music for the game are seriously unaligned with the narrative. The game starts with loads of upbeat Japanese music and mountains of exposition for the game’s new protagonist, Katrielle Layton, the daughter of the usual protagonist Professor Hershel Layton from the games I played as a kid. The pop music and her enchantingly showing that she’s working at a new detective shop, right off the bat, represents a stark departure from the more intriguing and ‘detective-y’ piano and accordion music from the old games, and instead is very pop and sets what I felt was the wrong tone for the game that the writers created, which later involves literal murder.
In short, this game forgot what it is and tried to be too many things at once. But for us game designers, shows what happens if you forget to integrate narrative, dynamics, and mechanics into one coherent tapestry. RIP PROFESSOR LAY LAY 😢
