It is Layton, so it's nothing spectacularly different from what you may have already experienced in the series. That indeed is true, but this game even flaws at following the same formula from older games, some puzzles feel tired in their concept, because many of them try to present a solution that is "outside of the box" in that the statement from the puzzle is nothing but a trick that you must not fall into. This really gets tiresome sometimes and does feel overused. The story fleshes out Layton's past, which was unexpected, but the finale falls short from being a truly memorable plot because the pacing was nothing like well-distributed.

I mean, it's not bad, but I guess I just expect something a little more engaging from the Layton series. Big positives are the soundtrack and the one Shop minigame. As far as the plot goes, I don't exactly have high expectations for Layton plots because I understand that the games are for kids and that Unwound Future is too good to expect its quality every time, but this game's plot specifically spends a lot of time on the culrpit's identity, which is one of the most obvious plot twists in video games, instead of actually focusing on any of the more interesting mysteries around the culprit's means and motive. As far as puzzles go, I was actually rather disappointed by this game's puzzles. I noticed a particular trend in the puzzle design of this game, and they came up so often that I started referring to them as "intern puzzles". The formula is that there's some story problem laid out to make for the mechanics of a puzzle. Something like "This ant has to cross over a matrix of overlapping pencils to reach the other side, which single pencil can you pick up to give him a clear path?" And then there'll be a complicated matrix of overlapping pencils, 6 of which are colored. So you'll spend a few minutes tracing the potential paths the ant can go down, which ways get cut off, what would happen if you removed a pencil that was obstructing, what would happen if you moved a pencil to lift something on top of it, what would happen if you placed a pencil down elsewhere to serve as a bridge, etc. And then after a while you realize the ant is sitting on top of a colored pencil and that the answer is to lift that one up and just place it on the other side. Basically, the solution is to not engage with the puzzle created at all and to instead engage with the story that the puzzle is framed with. The first time you see this it's cute, a humorous little gotcha, but when it starts to feel like 10-20% of the puzzles in the game do variants of this trick, the game starts to feel a bit hollow. That's not to say there aren't any good puzzles, in fact I'd say the 3DS's hardware was used well on a number of them, but I guess they felt a bit... lazy? Like a "we've been doing this for 5 games" mentality.