2.5/5 ★ – benhmedia's review of Professor Layton and the Curious Village HD for Mobile.

Mixed feelings on this one. On paper, this should be a game that I love everything about, with its hand-drawn animation, puzzle solving, and quaint French aesthetic. It saddens me to say that I decided to stop playing about halfway through - but not because I think it’s a terrible game. I just got bored by the gameplay loop. There are SO many puzzles in this game that you’re constantly bombarded with. While I do tend to like puzzle games, I felt that this game really values quantity over quality. I was invested with some of the puzzles, but many were either too simple or too obtuse. After about 5 hours logged in the game, I realized I wasn’t having that much fun. The story was somewhat intriguing, but when you’re being stopped every minute to answer a trivial puzzle, it ends up feeling too dragged out. The soundtrack would be nice, it certainly fits the setting and genre of the game. But most of the time you end up listening to the same few tracks on loop and it all gets way too repetitive. The animated cutscenes were great, but there really aren’t that many of them aside from the very beginning and end (I watched the later cutscenes on YouTube). I feel like this is the kind of game I would have had more patience for if I had played it as a kid on my Nintendo DS. It is quite an impressive game for something that was originally released on that system. As I said earlier, it’s not a horrible experience. There’s enough puzzles where, no matter what your age, you’re bound to come across *some* that you enjoy. I just think there are other games within its genre that do just about everything better.