Game review: Layton’s Mystery Journey

I recently started playing Layton’s Mystery Journey due to having a positive experience of another game that partially included the same game concept. That game was called "Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney". I may do a review of that other game soon. I have just begun playing this game and is far from finished playing it. In the game, you get to have some form of case given to you and your agency that you are to solve. As far as I have experienced it yet, you don’t really need to do anything but talking to people and travel to destinations pointed out for you on a minimap and the game eventually tells you that the case is solved. So not much problem solving in that perspective but that’s not why I bought the game. Btw I got the game for iOS. Furthermore, the game is childish, or at least kid-friendly. The game has mentioned a murder at one point so it being children-friendly or not depends on how sensitive you are. The game is rated age 4+. The game universe takes place in a jolly good ol’ place called London where everyone is really friendly. Just like in real life, friendly and outgoing Londoners, right? Not that I have ever been to London, but I can imagen that it may not be like that in real life. It being kid-friendly is somewhat part of the game concept I would guess however. Another thing I noticed playing on the phone is that conversation text is a bit small, I would like the text font to be bigger. It is readable but still a bit of a nuisance. Besides just having a too small text font it gets worse by the fact that the story is so far from action oriented you can get. No explosions or horrors or anything thrilling at all. So, in my view the reading conversations and following up with the story is not all that interesting in my view. Probably a very subjective thing if you like a story or not. The reason I got this game is because that this game has something surprisingly no other game tends to focus on. This game has puzzles, well-made ones, that required thinking to be solved. Some of the times at least, absolutely not always… Sometimes the ‘puzzle’ blurs into being a riddle perhaps.

What I can say about the puzzles in this particular game is that they have been OKish. Most puzzles have been way too easy to solve. This may be due to the fact that this game isn’t for adults? Some puzzles are harder though. What annoys me is that sometimes I get the impression that the answer to a puzzle is wrong, or that the instructions for a puzzle lack information or explains it wrongly. To give an example, one small puzzle with two options went like this: “Which path should you choose given this road sign if you want to avoid traffic? One path is always busy so everyone taking this road choses the quiet path. Chose the quiet or the busy path.”. My reasoning for solving this riddle was that given the instructions the busy path is always busy. We do not know how many other cars go through the path we are currently at besides us. Given the instructions we know that one path is always busy, and the other path may have a chance of being quiet. Therefore, I reasoned that the quiet path had the highest (or only chance) of actually being quiet. The answer was that you can never rely on an old road-sign to tell you if a path is busy or not. Then it also said that everyone chose the quiet path so it would be very busy and no one would take the busy path so it would be free of traffic because of it. I could comment on many things here, but what annoyed me is that I got the impression that the instructions implied or said that the busy path was always busy and not that the “old” road sign said it. Also, while choosing an option to submit as a result, there was a picture of the “old” road sign. All that was on the picture was a sign with two arrows with the names of the given paths. I have learned in this game to never trust the images. The images are very misleading and have made me try to reason given what I have seen being displayed on the image of a puzzle. On another occasion, the artwork for a puzzle showed digital numbers. So, I thought that I was to solve the puzzle given the numbers being showed on the image. It was later that I discovered that the digital numbers being displayed on the image were supposed to be “off”, i.e. not showing. When the puzzle was solved another image was showed with the digital numbers being lit as if the machines having the digital numbers were “on”. I must be honest though. If I had been smarter and understood the instructions better I could have arrived at the correct result by myself. You can spend “coins” in the game to use hints to help you solve a puzzle. After using many hints, I managed to solve this puzzle. The puzzle was good, it’s just that I was misled by the image and didn’t understand the problem sufficiently.

I guess the game is OK in general. Maybe a bit too happy and not so problem filled so far for my taste. Something that I haven’t mentioned that this game also has showed some anime clips that also were a bit long. Anime clips being long in a game is good in my opinion. Usually I have found them to be very short. There’s also tons of artwork in this game if you like that. They have focused on making pretty drawings. The characters in game are ugly/goofy or childish though. The puzzles are okay but sometimes a bit too easy.