Game of the Week: Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box
Finished the second Layton game yesterday. Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box (or Diabolical Box as it is known in the United States) continues the puzzlefest and provides a good ten hours worth of brainteasers.
The game is pretty same as the first part of the series. This time, instead of a curious village, the environment is a luxurious train (and a couple of villages, since there’s obviously never enough of a good thing).
The structure of the game remains the same – a more or less improbable storyline packed with characters who want to test the protagonists’ skills at solving puzzles to advance the story. And the puzzles are plentiful indeed, with quite a few new types added to the portfolio.
The Professor Layton series has been a major hit, and the original trilogy has now been supplemented with a second trio of prequels. Though that’s the situation in Japan only, the western countries apparently will receive just one translated game a year. The next one, concerning a time machine, hopefully gets released next fall.
The style of the game has not changed. Most of the time the screens contain static images. A couple of key scenes have been properly rendered in animation. The ambient music is timeless as ever, and I’ll definitely keep an eye out for the series’ soundtrack cds in the future.
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