There's a lyric in music I think about a lot from Porter Robinson's Nurture, the track Trying to Feel Alive.

"Somebody somewhere finds the warmth of summer in the songs you write. Maybe it's a gift I just couldn't recognise, trying to feel alive"

I think about the lyric a lot because it's the purest encapsulation of what art should be, the grasping of something from beyond where we are, processing the craft we make into a feeling. This game tries to be like that, it's ending lines evoke a very similar feeling.

"love is more important than video games... but if u make video games with love then maybe ur love will reach people in ways u never imagined ♡"

This is a nice message, a nice idea, but this piece doesn't do more than be a springboard into more interesting discussion. It's fine, but I'm going to be honest a lot of the reviews for this are more interesting than the game itself. It's a good springboard into deeper discussion about video games and the medium at large, but the game itself doesn't really go much deeper than a very surface of these topics. It is made purely of the emotion of the human behind it and I don't want to undervalue that. These are topics that should be given a lot more room for discussion but it's not the first time I've seen stances like these, it's not revolutionary.

Maybe one day it'll strike me like it has others, maybe it never will. I'm glad it exists so we can keep having these conversations but I think exactly what we're looking for already exists out there, these systems, worlds, stim toys, party activities, parties, art exhibits, art, sports, cursed items, magic rituals and even hrt.

It's conflicting, I like the message of the game but the game itself is really nothing special to me. It springboard into this review, so maybe it's special for that alone.

Games are so strange. Keep making them.

A short game that has a really interesting central idea but is let down by it's scope and game play decisions.

The game is solving a set of small, locked rooms at 4 locations, a Cabin, a Theatre, a Tower and a Castle, 6 mysteries total. You use the information given, the diagram provided and your logic to crack the case.

The biggest failing Is the way in which the cases are solved, being a series of questions that you need to answer to progress. This causes a bit of a problem when you have solved a aspect of the mystery but the case is lagging a bit behind your reasoning or when you know around about what you need to present but it's not EXACTLY what the game wants. This isn't a problem unique to this game, a lot of other games fall into this pit trap to various degrees of annoyance. It becomes a more noticeable issue when the lack of actual narrative within these locked rooms makes the structure of solving them in a very set in stone order less appealing. Any story the locked rooms have either get explained AFTER solving or are just set dressing for the room to exist at all. The Tower Case felt like its story could of been more baked into the flow of questions but nothing really comes of it.

I think allowing a more natural flow of reasoning would be helpful, maybe instead of a string of questions in a set order, you have a list of the questions you can tackle in any order you want, piece by piece rather than it fluctuating between a solution you've not considered yet or one you figured out a while ago.

I like the presentation of the locked rooms, it's charmingly simple but does convey enough information to allow the cases to work. It's fun watching the crime unravel with these little game pieces.

The three characters, Shelly, Bo and Loup, are extremely basic but work well enough to have banter and conversation in between the case solving, the small attempts at development are cute but far from anything beyond surface. I hope if more games get made, they can expand on these characters more, there's a great dynamic in there.

Biggest disappointment was the last case, which was pretty big compared to the previous ones, a much larger scale with more to keep track of and remember. I was impressed by it even if some of the methods used was somewhat obvious. But my issue came in the fact that only after the case is solved and, in the credits, do you find out that this is based on a short story by John Dickson Carr, a master of locked room mysteries. The significant step up in case quality was very quickly explained and I felt like mentioning beforehand that it's a adaption would of been appreciated. If I did miss anything signposting this was the case, I do apologise.

I overall liked it more than I didn't, but it's something I wish could of been a bit more than it ended up being. I do hope the best for the developers and their future projects, this is clearly a labour of love for the genre and a act of passion.

I watched my girlfriend play this one so I'm not judging this on gameplay as I didn't have first-hand experience. Thankfully, this game is an absolute riot of a time.

The writing is so good, it is consistently really funny the entire way through and never loses its charm. Its voice cast is comprised of vets in the animation industry, and you can really well, they all do well in giving life to these characters. Its visuals hold up well, not the most technically impressive looking but its art style choices make it harder to age.

The characters are all likable and have personality oozing out of them, even minor characters who don't do much narratively feel like they have more going on with little details like how they view Raz or how they're feeling as the game goes on. Mini arcs make the world feel alive in a great way.

Also Raz is a joy, he is such a good protagonist.

The individual stories of the brains you enter also do well in getting a lot of the brain diving, levels/games based around entering peoples personal mind is a genre I love and want more of it's just great storytelling potential.

I'm excited to see the story continue, I can understand why people wanted a sequel and its really deserved.

I might come back to play myself to comment on the gameplay eventually, since I can only say what I saw and not what I experienced, but it looked very fun!

This game deserves a better reputation than what it has, I don't believe this is "The Metal Gear with the best gameplay but the worst story" at all. Going too far into why would become spoilerly and I'd prefer not to, but this deserves to stand alongside the other enteries as a great story with excellent characters and just really brilliant moments. The (phantom) pain of never seeing the complete vision of what was planned will always string, but what we still have, still got to hold on to, is a blessing to itself.

For a take that's far less bold, the gameplay in this is excellent, this game getting close to being a decade old is one of the most visually stunning, technically impressive marvels of game design I've ever seen and carries on the series tradition of being revolutionary for the age it was made. This is a fun game to play with a lot of replayability and content, extremely dense and fun to experiment with.

I'm extremely happy with the way this ends the franchise, the perfect loop it creates going back to MG1, a close circle that ends the final game as the perfect narrative set up for the first.

This is purely a review of case 1, as that's all that is currently out.

This is a project with a insane amount of potental, the first case shows a lot of passion for keeping the writing of characters from both series feeling natural and just right, it's so seamless I forget this is a crossover. I like the changes to DR and AA lore to make it work and it's a good solution that can keep the two not feeling at odds thematically.

The case writing itself is okay, it is a decent mystery with some fun contradictions but far from flawless. Some of the logical routes you need to take are either really unclear or not explained well and there gets point where the easiest contradictions are the ones that are given far more weight than it feels like they should. Like hyping up this next contradiction as "This is it Phoenix, now or never, if I don't solve this the case is over" for a contradiction that's so obvious you can notice it before it's even vaguely relevant to the case doesn't land that well.

The custom art for the game is really cool, It is obvious it's a lot of different artists doing different parts so consistency isn't there, but it's damn impressive they have this amount of custom art at all, the new spritework for the AA characeters looks clean as hell, the custom DR character fits the style well and the evidence looks really good for such a small team project. Also, while not made specifically for this, the ost by Everything Fantasy is always a joy to hear. Check Everything Fantasy out he's great.

I look forward to the future of this one, theres potental here and hopefully this does eventually see a full complete release!

This is a technical marvel of a game that has so many small issues that causes a death of 1000 cuts. I liked this game and am happy I finished it, but it is a deeply flawed experience that is never the result of 1 big obvious issue but smaller collective ones.

My praises are plentiful even if this will be mostly the issues I had, but let it be known that I enjoyed playing enough to consider 100% at one point and did get a vast majority of the Shrines, all the memories, a decent amount of side quests and most of the map seen. This is a grand adventure that you can feel in your own way, I loved to turn the HUD to pro and just let my fancy take me wherever, because you will always find something wherever you go. This is the adventure you have, not anyone else’s and that is really wonderful. So please, despite how negative the rest of this review is, I'm not doing it out of malice but desire for it to be better.

Ripping the band aid off now, I don't think weapon durability is fun but it's not something I think ruins the game. I'd prefer if there was more options in terms of how you could deal with it, maybe being able to get weapons you like easier after you've got them before and not cause a massive grind to get good weapons, that usually results in you losing weapons to get weapons by fighting stronger enemies with better weapons and the cycle repeats on and on.

The Shrines range from really fun puzzles that test your ability to interact with the game and it's mechanics and being allowed to be creative with the solutions, or the ones that are massive wastes of time designed to test your patience. Not all shrines are made equal and the reward being the same for them all can feel uneven. Strangest of all is when the shrine requires a puzzle to even find it, and it's then a 50/50 split on if that shrine is then also a unique puzzle or just a staircase that gives you the reward.

None of the divine beasts or actual designated boss fights found within are that fun to me at all, they range from "Kinda uninteresting" to "Actively Unenjoyable". Shout out that one boss who kept falling outside the door and soft locking the fight into being impossible to beat like 5 times in a row. And for the final boss, I just kind of didn't enjoy my time with it much, with the final phase being comedically easy compared to the first phase which I was struggling. I wish when you lost it would just take you back to the point you was at and not the very beginning where I had to rewatch/skip the cutscene again to attempt the fight, that got on my nerves very quickly.

There's some other smaller issues that really start to pile up, like swapping a weapon/shield/bow with a new one you find at a full inventory is really annoying. Rain being the worst random event to ever befall you ever as your best bet is to either create a fire or thug it out until you can climb again. Post game upgrades with the amount of rupees the game expects out of you is frankly absurd with a annoying grind to even get close to what you need for it. Side quests are mostly uninteresting compared to older games in terms of the smaller narratives you see throughout.

It has been a mostly negative review and I do ultimately like this game enough to finish it and possibly go back for DLC eventually, and maybe even its sequel, but it has so many small compounding issues that just really hold it back for me. It took me 4 tries starting from the beginning to get to the end of the game because I kept falling off wanting to play it at different points because these issues, but I am happy I did see it to the end eventually. This is a really excellent and impressive game, I just wish I could say flawless.

Maybe TotK can be that fix, but only time will tell.

I really like how needlessly brutal the murder was in this one, like jesus okay man. However a very specific issue I have with this and the second is that BRO THE PUNS AREN'T CONSISTENT! IF YOUR GONNA DEDICATE TO ANIMAL BASED PUNS AND WORLD BUILDING DON'T JUST SAY "NETFLIX" WITHOUT ANY ALTERATION TO MAKE IT A PUN. YOU FRAUD!

Anyway mystery is fairly predictable and the humour is getting a bit too inconsistent for my liking. But it's not worse than the second entry, I prefer it a little more, but like not a half star more.

I'm sad I never got to this franchise sooner, this is great. Professor Layton and the Curious Village is not the first entry in the series I've played, unfortunately it was the crossover with Ace Attorney that took that privilege and it painted a slightly negative view in my mind (I really don't like PLvsPW)

Starting from the beginning properly, I loved the charm this game has, the unique character design, the small list of music tracks that are here are all absolute bangers, the mystery is eccentric but fun and the puzzles are, for the most part, really well done (Put a pin in this).

Layton is a really fun character to watch, he has a charm about him that is impossible to describe. Watching him talk and interact with increasingly bizarre people is a joy and how he handles the mystery solving is honestly great. And that main mystery, while a little predictable in some ways, has a lot of really nice moments. The beginning of the deductions into the mysteries of this town and the ending are highlights for me, mainly because when a cutscene plays you know its gonna be peak.

Now I mentioned putting a pin in the what I said earlier about puzzles, "for the most part" is very key. My major complaint and frankly the only one I really have is as the game goes on, you start seeing the same types of puzzles over and over. "Who is the liar", "Slide the blocks to create a exit", "Move the ball to the hole" and others kept peering their heads, and the issue becomes when you've solved one, you've basically solved them all. I sucks seeing a puzzle and going "This again?"

This also creates a issue of by late game, you're getting privy to the games tricks that it tries to pull, the phrasing of questions, the fake outs, the attempts to mislead you, eventually when your playing by it's logic, you start to find them predictable.

Another minor issue is the puzzle types that require you to find x amount of shape in y, and how with the tools at your disposal on a DS, if you play with only whats given, it becomes a mental trial of trying to not forget a absurd amount of info without any means of physical note taking. This is a issue I hear gets fixed in later enteries and is just a growing pain of being the first entery in the franchise, but still worth mentioning.

While the tangent on issues I have does seem long, in the grand scheme of the game, I enjoyed the puzzles enough to go for 100% in it, and strived for as much as a perfect, no hint coin run as possible. This was a joy from start to finish, and I cannot to delve further into this series.

Goodbye, you curious village, it's time to open Pandora's Box!

I want to apologise to my lovely girlfriend first and foremost, I love you, this isn't what it looks like I promise.

Stumbling upon this while going through the PlayStation 2 games on this site and seeing that cover, I wondered what the hell it was. What I was expecting is what most people probably guessed seeing the same cover as I, just softcore porn that was experimentally put on the PS2 disc to try and see if it'd workout as a groundbreaking new idea. And yeah, that is about right, there was like 4 others of these that was made as well and I assume they realised it was a wasted venture, not enough big stacks coming in from big racks so they pulled the plug on doing it ever again. They learned, they stopped making them, time moved on, world peace was achieved, yay.

So why am I reviewing it?
Hearing other reviews mention just how bizarre it has made me curious about what they meant, and yeah that cat sure died on this one, the answer was they're right.

In "brief":
This is the most disorientating, actually headache inducing, that feeling when you stand up too fast when iron deficient feeling experience ever.
It has the ambience of a horror by how much it feels like it's trying to fuck with you on a psychological level, paired with sometimes ethereal, other times vaguely off putting music honestly can make it feel like a waking nightmare. I haven't fell this unnerved by anything in a long time.
I must remind that this is just softcore porn, the type of shit you'd see in those Yakuza minigames level of spice, you know?

Seeing a tree morph before my eyes like a great old one horror had awakened from slumber, as time grinded to a halt while the titular "Megumi" (If I'm to believe her) tried to eat spaghetti, zipping around place to place while a water sprinkler tanks the videos quality, the constant feeling like you’re the one being watched and not the other way around. I have not experienced horror like this in a while.

That'd be great if it was its intentions, sadly in terms of being a means by which you look a boob and go "Damn" it has failed horribly. Sorry Megumi you tried your best, just don't distort the fabric of reality and give me a headache next time.

So yeah, it's like a 3/10, could’ve been better.