Review: Professor Layton and the Last Specter

Professor Layton and the Last Specter is a puzzle game for the Nintendo DS. It was developed by Level-5.

What it looks like wandering around the map. The shoe makes the directional arrows appear, and the trunk leads to the pause menu.

Professor Layton and his new assistant have been called to the town of Misthallery by Mayor Triton, an old friend of Layton’s, to investigate a mysterious specter that is destroying the town. The specter only attacks at night, seemingly at random, and its movements are somehow predicted by Triton’s son Luke. Layton and Emmy have to team up with Luke to find the source of the specter somewhere in Misthallery.

Last Specter initially appears to be an adventure game, but that is only a frame to house the one hundred and fifty five puzzles the game has. The player, controlling Layton, travels through Misthallery, which are represented by static screens with people moving in front of them. The player moves around by tapping arrows on the screen, and talk to people by tapping on them.

The game story progresses by Layton going being told or figuring out that he has to go somewhere, and going there. Sometimes a cut scene will trigger when Layton arrives, other times he has to talk to person, and maybe solve a puzzle. Then Layton moves onto the next place.

The player finds puzzles by tapping on people on the way to Layton’s destination, or just places, or the people Layton has to talk to move the story along. The player does not have to do every puzzle Layton runs across, but there are points in the game where the player can progress unless they have solved a certain amount of puzzles.

There are several types of puzzles, some more fun than others. The best puzzles are the brainteasers that do not require outside knowledge of something to solve, and do not involve trying something over and over again until you get the correct answer. Also, the better ones use DS’ touchscreen capabilities. Most of the puzzles are like this.

The worse puzzles are slider puzzles, puzzles that need outside knowledge of some topic, or worst of all, puzzles that are just math, algebra, or geometry problems. These do not make up most of the puzzles in the game, but do make up a significant amount.

One of the worse puzzles.

Overall the puzzles are very challenging but not impossible. A lot of them take some time to figure out, and a lot of them you are not going to solve on the first try.

When you solve a puzzle you get picarats. By collecting picarats you unlock bonus content, like extra puzzles and artwork. The amount of picarats you get goes down if you answer a puzzle incorrectly.

There are hint coins hidden in Misthallery that you can spend on one clue per puzzle. Each puzzle has up to four clues you can buy, and get more helpful with each purchase. Most of the hints are somewhat useful, though at times they can be vague and useless.

There are three side games Layton collects; one is about laying train tracks so a train will go through stations in a correct order; another is setting up bubbles so a goldfish will collect coins; and a third is putting the correct words in a script for a play. The first two are fun, the third one is pretty stupid since it is obvious which words to use.

The story is not really interesting. There is a mystery, at one point Layton and his friends are threatened, but it never really feels like the stakes are that high. And it never feels like Layton and co. treat the specter like it is an emergency. The story throws some ideas to what the Specter is, it is some old guardian, it has a connection to a hidden garden, but the narrative does not explore that until the end. Layton and his friend are the only interesting characters, the rest are mostly forgettable except for the children. At least the cut scenes in the game are animated very well and have great voice acting; they look like they are from a real movie.

Last Specter games with a whole second game called London Life, which would need a whole second review to cover properly. I am not going to review it, because I got bored after two hours.

Professor Layton and the Last Specter is a bit of a letdown. It has some decent puzzles, though it also has a lot of unpleasant puzzles, and it is really hard to care about the story too much.