Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village.
 

Trailer (YouTube)

A new adventure (maybe?) game for DS developed by Level 5. You know Level 5, they made some fairly unknown games like uuh, oh, Dark Cloud 1 and 2, Rogue Galaxy and they've also got that White Knight Story for PlayStation 3.

Here's something to click on if you want.

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/...1/level520.jpg http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/...1/level512.jpg http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/...1/level518.jpg

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/...1/level517.jpg http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/...1/level515.jpg http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/...1/level516.jpg

Apparently it has FMV, too.

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/...1/level523.jpg

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/...1/level526.jpg

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/...1/level521.jpg

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/...1/level528.jpg

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/...1/level529.jpg

ADVENTURE (MAYBE?!) TASTY.

Ugh what are Level 5 doing? Where is my half arsed dungeon crawling town planning hybrid?

Wow, I normally like Level 5 stuff, but this game looks B-O-R-I-N-G.

Essentially, it's all just still images?

You base this off screenshots? What?

Actually, yes. As you can see, most of those characters are just solid sprites, and some of the pics are just fullscreen stills for storyline.

What I'm saying is that there doesn't appear to be much in the way of animation. The drawings are too detailed to be fully articulate sprites. Plus, I dunno, I'm just turned off by the style (and the fact that it's essentially a collection of spatial thinking SAT-style puzzles with a story).

It looks like... some sort of German/French cartoon with some Spirited Away-inspiration.
Normally I'm a huge fan of Level 5, but this doesn't look... that great. However, if this means playing another adventure, I'm all for it.

Well I'm digging the art style for sure. It's a puzzle/adventure game. It's not likely to have big flashy 3D platforming doodlybobs. Makin' the cogs go, s'what this game is all about. I'm glad to see Level 5 take a stab in a different direction, despite their record of success with colorful RPGs.

Well this is certainly different. I am REALLY digging the art style of this. It almost looks like old school french animation. Almost "Tintin-ish" in a sense. I love games that experiment like this. :)

Adventure games have had quite realistic animation of facial movement and motion for nearly a decade, now, even if the basic design is still a cariacture of a person. I mean, the way mouths, brows, cheeks, and all the other muscles moves fits the speech. 5-frame sprite animations were left behind a loooooooooong time ago on the PC, and it's quite possible this might use the same techniques.

If not, I'd be disappointed.

The FMV's got some nice cel-painted color, too, even if the main game is obviously CG, I like that.

First post updated with the trailer. Nice music and cartoony animey stuffy, but it shows very little of the game.

This game looks way too trippy to ignore. I'ma keep an eye on this one. Very little gameplay is actually shown. I'm tempted to go along with Jazzflight on this one. It looks like a bunch of stupidly hard puzzles with a story. I might try this game just for the story, and i am impressed with the artwork. Very Spirited Away.

Man, it looked so good up until the gameplaaaay ;____;

Still, it looks AWESOME. I LOVE the style (Tin Tin for the win!), and the music was groovy, so hopefully it ends up being fun too.

:eyebrow: This looks about as entertaining as a Miyazaki film.

They better fucking bring this game out here. I need my adventure fix. Fucking Lucas Arts. *grumble* *grumble*

"OH, IT DOESN'T HAVE THAT CRAPTASTIC CELL-SHADING, THIS GAME LOOKS BORING, I WANT ROGUE GALAXY INSTEAD............."

Seriously, what the hell, guys. As if Level 5 has some kind of obligation to you to make every game an RPG.

Personally, I can't tell if the gameplay will be just a series of minigames and puzzles, but I'm loving the visual style. Not just the characters and animation, but that wonderful building in the middle of the town looks so marvelous. It'd be a shame if the game will be lacking, but at least the look is great and I'm glad to see Level 5 try something different for once.

I can't stop watching the trailer for the music alone.. :)

Now that this is out, does anyone else have it?

I'm really digging it, even though some of the puzzles really make you feel stupid with the answers that are common sense, but at the same time terribly obscure to someone who lacks common sense like me. I even managed to fail the first puzzle, embarrasingly enough, although I would have got it if I was patient and stared longer rather than try to find hidden meaning in the words and what twists they could hold.

Honestly, these puzzles are well-contrived even if lots of them have been done before in other places. Such puzzles with the following rationale for answers really make me both furrow my brows in awe, and facepalm at the same time:



Somehow too, the neat thing was that as I was playing, 5 of my young friends came by and all got stuck with me on certain puzzles, and we sat for periods of time thinking about solutions to quite a few of them. They didn't get bored and were somehow drawn in by these logic puzzles.

The music is also nice and creepy, which I like.

I fucking love this game. My mom got it, and I'm borrowing it from her today since I'm working a long day. It's just a great little title with awesome puzzles. Well worth a purchase.

I got about 30 puzzles done. I love the game to death. :3:

I like this game but it's damn frustrating and I have to concentrate at it. A clever ruse to put a brain training game in adventure sheep's clothing. I do enjoy it despite the head slaps I give to myself because of how easily I should get the puzzles yet miss something.

THE LATEST 5 POSTS DOES A VERY BAD JOB OF HIDING WHAT'S IN SPOILERS. LET'S TYPE SOMETHING HERE SO I COULD COVER IT UP FOR NOW.

Yup, I love this game. I've already finished the main playthrough, but I haven't got all the puzzles yet. There certainly are some noodle scratchers in the mix. I like the animation and FMVs, the characters and plot are pretty solid, and the voice acting is surprisingly not annoying. ('K so Luke's voice can get kinda annoying) Didn't like the music one bit, but I've gotta admit that Puzzle tune had something going for it.

As for my favourite puzzle (so far), that "Monster!" one where the night sky is the monster. That was so good, but simple.

Heh, this game kept me all night long... into the morning! @_@
Good thing I didn't have much to do today yesterday. lol

I think I've done over 40 puzzles. This game is great. XD

This game is indeed AWESOME. :D Can't wait to play the sequel!

I hope the sequel is released regardless of sales, instead of a situation like Psychonauts where there was no sequel. The puzzles are still keeping me up until 3am making me want to play more!

I know hint coins are meant to be used but I hoard them like a miser and restart if I ever resort to using one or three, so I'm still sitting at 60 or so hint coins in stock. I also don't like losing picarats due to the manual and game's vague phrase: "something good will happen if you collect a lot of these." Thus, I'm always at max picarats for that reason.

Seeing how obsessive these actions are, it's sort of annoying how I only have one unsolved puzzle so far throughout the quest. It's a matchstick one and I definitely don't want to look at a faq:

I hope I'm wrong on that one.

Well I beat the game doing the same thing you're doing, and from what I can tell, nothing happens base on your picarats.

Summonmaster:



Got through the game in about 10 hours, missed about 8 puzzles or so. Never showed at Grannies, must be environmental ones or something.

^^ Yeah there are some really well-hidden ones. I spent ages finding one in the Market area. I mean, honestly, who think to scan every square-inch of a wall for a hidden puzzle.

Other than that, this game is still <3.

Wait a minute now. There's one on the wall in the Market? Well, fuck me. That's probably one I missed. <3.

Whew thanks CS! I should have known not to restrict my thinking to uniform size letters, given the nature of all the other puzzles!

Not that it's a big deal, but going along the lines of obscurely hidden puzzles, those hint coins have tiny frame boxes too! Clicking on single bricks or one pixel wide circles made me wonder a bit.

Whoa this thread's ancient! Still very interested in playing this also, but there are too many other games now. Sorry Professor you are very late and grape escaaaape fuck that board game was awesome.

Maybe I'll chuck it in with mah Apollo Justice order ='(

Yeah, don't worry. That one got me too. I remember it vividly, especially when I ended up solving it with a "OH FUCK OFF" yelled loud enough to wake the neighbours.

The neat thing about the game is that ALL of the puzzles make you feel like a god damn idiot when you see the answer. Excluding maybe the chess ones and sliding block ones, it's like "Oh. Duuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" a lot.

I suppose I'll mention I placed my order for the game at dvdboxoffice a few days ago. Hopefully they'll ship it soon.

I had been hesitant about the game a while back, watching the trailer made me pleasantly surprised about how well they'd picked the voice actors. And anyone who knows me a little should know how queezy I generally get about dubbing of any kind.

Then Luke's voice might make you a little queasy. It seems like a faux British accent... And a bad one for that matter. But that's just me.

Well, all the voices I heard in the trailer suit them well, much to my surprise. The british accents were perhaps a bit overdone, but they fit the characters and atmosphere a lot better than the brit rape in games like Forbidden Siren or Ape Escape 1, for instance. Even FFXII botched up the cockney stuff.

Either way, good enough to convince me to buy the game~

My favorite puzzle EVAR? Its the 8 queens puzzle. God that was just awesome. Strangely enough its the four queens puzzle that had me stumped for a while til I got it down.

My least favorite puzzle is that stupid camera and the case puzzle. :\ I still didn't get the answer til I figured in my head some other time later and saw how it worked but still it fucking sucked.

So I did cave in and buy the game - just haven't had much time to get very far into it, yet.

Right now, I'm stuck on the 10 picarat rope and coin question of all things, because I keep mixing up which side of the rope will be "up" after it's taut. This is because I have the brainpower of an ant, which begs the question, why am I playing this game in the first place?

(I blame Meia. :tpg: )

Also, new tall hat avatar coming liek wut

I refused to click "Input Answer" on that until I realized that the way they outline it after you answer it is much better than straining your eyes along the rope :/ Doodling stuff in should help a bit!