Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

How do I know that Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box is great? Up until a few weeks ago, my wife has been playing it.

This is a stamp of approval equal to a 10 out of 10 score. If you can picture someone who, at best, is ambivalent about video games (at worst, hostile) suddenly taking an unhealthy interest in a particular piece of electronic

entertainment, then you can probably understand my reasoning. It was with great interest that I started The Diabolical Box.

Like Professor Layton's previous adventure in The Curious Village, The Diabolical box is filled with interesting characters trying to unravel a mystery, which is constantly road-blocked by logic and math problems.

The strength of the story and the characters were enough to make me want to continue, to work through the harder puzzles to figure out the mystery.  The puzzles are less troublesome than in Curious Village. At least, it feels that way since I fell back on the in-game hint system only a handful of times rather than dozens of times.  Even so, there are a few doozies that really forced me to think and at least one puzzle that I answered correctly but the game wouldn't recognize as correct. (I had reduced a fraction and the game didn't like that.) Either way, it's still satisfying to solve a puzzle and push the story forward.

The presentation and some spoken dialogue really do a lot to hold everything else together. Any puzzle/adventure games can be distilled into a collection of puzzles but the lines holding The Diabolical Box together make for a great challenge and an entertaining experience.

It's money well-spent.

- Aaron Simmer

(January 8, 2010)