I personally started my Layton journey with miracle mask, but of course I wanted to check out the earlier games in the series at some point too. No better place to start than the very first one, and it does certainly have the mark of first-game-in-the-series-itis. It’s a relatively low stakes story where I feel for most of the plot not much really happens. The conclusion has some of the qualities I would come to love Layton for shining through though, and the characters are filled to the brim with charm.

Puzzle-wise they strike a good balance so that no puzzle takes too long to solve, and there’s plenty pf hint coins around if needed, but the difficulty of said puzzles is kind of all over the place sometimes. Some I cleared in 5 seconds, some took like half an hour if not more, and these would both happen rather randomly during the course of the adventure. As it is the first game, it’s clear they still had to iron that out a bit, but most of these puzzles are still quality.

Overall, I really liked this first adventure, and looking forward to moving on to the next one, where I also started collecting layton games in different regional dubs just for the fun of it.