Professor Layton and the Limits of Plausibility

You've got to admire a game that features a double-decker bus.

For a while now, Whitney and I have had the third Professor Layton game in that odd state between finished and not-finished when you've seen the ending but are yet to go back through the game and solve all the available puzzles. But I finally sat down to do it tonight, even if it meant cheating and looking up a couple of the solutions.

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future doesn't really depart from the other games - once again, you wander round as the well-spoken Professor and his assistant Isabella Valentine, trying to solve a mystery while being thrown puzzles of varying irrelevance from all sides. This time, the story takes place in London, which for the purposes of this game has been relocated to France - the accordion is still a perpetual force here as if you're walking through a Dolmio advert, and I can only imagine the conversation with the musician (who also obviously did Dark Chronicle) - "Can you do us some British-themed music?" "No, but I can make the entire game sound like you're being followed around by a four-piece polka band." "That's close enough".

As far as I can remember from the previous two games, there's rather more voice acting this time, and unusually for a game, it's done quite pleasantly on the whole - normally, there is very little more comical than Americans trying to sound British, but I must say that Christopher Miller does a very good aural impression of an English gentleman (along with a very good visual impression of Billy Mays). I hadn't actually realized that it wasn't his real voice in the last two games, and that's pretty much the pinnacle of achievement as far as I'm concerned. Flora is undisguisedly American, the new storyline characters are very English, one of the villains appears to have tragically decided that the best example of a British voice to emulate was Liquid Snake, and the less said about Luke the better.

But the focus of the game is in the brainteasers dropped liberally throughout the plot by every character with a weird-shaped nose that you come into contact with. The main thing that's actually different about the games are the special large puzzles that you gradually piece together over the course of the game, and while there's nothing that's ever going to beat solving people's problems one cup of tea at a time, the offerings this time around are decent enough. There's a game where you piece together a series of picture books, one where you have to stretch a rope between pegs to guide a parrot to deliver hats, cakes, books and other miscellany to people on dangerous-looking platforms, and - my favourite - a wind-up mini which is guided around with little tiles like in Chu Chu Rocket, and which collapses comically into a heap when it inevitably crashes into a tree.

Now that you mention it, the potential for a Phoenix Wright crossover was obvious.

As for the individual puzzles, I admit that I found myself coming out of them thinking "Well, that one was a bit rubbish" with a rather greater frequency than in the last couple of games, though this feeling dropped away slightly once the game got going and it started giving out slightly cleverer ones. In addition, a rather greater than necessary amount of them seemed to be trick questions relying on the way that numbers can look different if you turn them upside down, as if all the puzzles had been designed by individual people in locked rooms with the criteria that they had to be vaguely related to clocks, and they hadn't all checked to see if anyone else had done virtually the same thing as one another at the end.

I was going to say that there weren't any "X-puzzles" (as I chose to christen them) this time around and that it seemed that they had gone a bit soft after the daunting sliding puzzles, Solitaire and Knight's Tour that concluded the second game, but in saying that I would have ignored the fact that I had to look up solutions on GameFAQs for the first time in the series - the parrot game in particular sometimes felt just too irritating to satisfy experimentation. And, just when you feel you're safe after having dead easy number puzzles doled out to you in most of the Houses at the end, it suddenly hits you with two consecutive slider puzzles, one of which requires you to get every single piece in a specific place instead of just one.

I can't really say much about the storyline without giving it away - there were plenty of charming and amusingly triumphant moments in it, but I couldn't help but feel like it was by far the least plausible out of the mysteries that have been presented to the characters so far (and trust me, the time travel is only the beginning). A lot of it deals with the Professor's past, building up to what might even count as a Don Bluth ending, and it would have been the most serious and heartwrenching storyline yet if I hadn't been questioning the holes in the plot so gigantic you could fling a penny-farthing through them.

But who cares - it's a puzzle book. It's nice. That's all you need to know.