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The makers of Professor Layton have a new puzzle game series that's going to stretch your brain in very different ways.
Last month, Level-5 released the first game in its Atamania series in Japan. Having enjoyed massive success with the stylish, addictive Layton series of logic puzzle games, Level-5 is expanding the genre outward with this new brand of smaller-scale, budget-priced puzzlers. This first is called Sloane and MacHale's Mysterious Stories.
Just as the Layton games are based on the logic puzzle books of Akira Tago, this is based on the series of "lateral thinking" puzzle books co-authored by Paul Sloane and Des MacHale.
Truth be told, although I had a childhood love of logic puzzles, I can't stand "lateral thinking" puzzles of the sort that fill these books. Mostly because, in book form like this, they're utterly unsolvable. Here is an example of one of the puzzles from the books, to show you what I mean:
A woman brought a new pair of shoes to work. She died. Why?
The most likely answer, of course, is that someone mugged and killed her, then sold her new shoes to a pawn shop and used the money to buy crack. But that's not the real answer; this is:
She was a blindfolded knife-thrower's assistant in a circus. Her new shoes had much higher heels than her normal shoes, so his usual unerring aim with the knife killed her.
How in the everloving name of pluperfect hell are you supposed to know that, of all the infinite possible answers, that's the right one? Beats me, and this is why whenever someone poses a "lateral thinking" problem to me my response is to start thinking about slapping them laterally across the face.
The correct answer is that these problems are utterly unsolvable unless someone else already knows the answer, and you can ask them yes or no questions to start solving the mystery.
Thankfully, Sloane and MacHale is this sort of game. Once you hear the mysterious story with all the salient details removed, you can begin deducing the answer by clicking on keywords, stringing them together to form questions to which the computer will answer "yes," "no," or "it doesn't matter."
For example, here's the first puzzle in the game, which you can play (in Japanese) at the official Web site. The puzzle reads:
Once, on a sunny day, a girl took an umbrella to school. She knew it was sunny out. And it wasn't a parasol: it was an umbrella used specifically for rainy days.
Why in the world would she do that?
Note that these early puzzles are quite a bit easier than the aforementioned knife-to-the-face one. Those get introduced later in the game. But these warm you up to the gameplay mechanics.
You can tap on many of the words in the puzzle, which will then lead you into a new screen, where you can drag a line between the word you've picked and a variety of other words, to form a yes/no question.
In the case shown at right, the keyword "yesterday" is being connected with the keyword "rain," which will ask the question: Did it rain yesterday?
The answer ends up being "yes."
It doesn't take too long to find the whole story: It rained the day before, and the girl borrowed a friend's umbrella, and she was bringing it back to return it.
To prove to the game that you know the answer, you can take a multiple-choice quiz at any time. The quiz will contain about five or more questions with many possible answers, and it won't tell you which ones you get right or wrong -- only if, after they are all correct, if you got all of them. This helps prevent cheating your way through the quiz, because you'd have to go through every combination of possible answer sets if you wanted to brute-force the solution.
So it's definitely an interesting puzzle game with Level-5's signature stylish presentation. Is it as good as Layton? I don't think so at this point, for a couple of reasons. It's a budget title, so it doesn't have all the grand animated sequences, characters, or story of Layton -- it's just a sequence of puzzles with barely any connective tissue to hold it together.
For another, the puzzles quickly get to the point where it's really tough to formulate an answer, or even come up with a good question or two right off the bat. You have to go on a fishing expedition, asking random questions in the hope that something pays off.
That said, it's interesting and fun enough that Layton fans have every reason to hope that someone will take on the (seemingly daunting) challenge of translating this game's massive pile of questions and answers into English.
For prospective importers: You definitely need to know Japanese. Luckily, the game has furigana, so looking up unknown words in the dictionary is quite easy.
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