So this week I’ve been playing a lot of Professor Layton and the Curious Village – and I finished Final Fantasy XIII, but I don’t have all my thoughts put together on that one yet. Honestly I might never have all my thoughts together on that one. It’s like one big, tangled ball of Christmas lights and barbed wire.
Professor Layton and the Curious Village is one of those games that doesn’t seem like much at first, but then turns out to be darn near perfect. The story reminds me of something that I just put my finger on. The warm coloring and charming aesthetic take me back to golden-washed afternoons, curled up with thin mystery books – The Boxcar Children, Encyclopedia Brown, Hawk the Cowdog… With a heavy British flavor added. There was one huge, spoilery plot element I saw coming a mile away, but it knowing it hardly ruins the fun. The puzzles are deceptively difficult – they are challenging, but not impossible. Most usually have some trick to them, which is worked into the description and hints.
Therein I discovered something about myself, one of those revelations that makes me sit up and go ‘wow’. As I played the game I started to notice that I’d have an answer for every puzzle reasonably quickly, but then I’d second guess myself and in some cases spend hours struggling with a puzzle. Basically the dyslexia kicked in, jumbling up the wording of the instructions and causing me to doubt the answer I’d come up with, which was usually the right answer.
It’s damn frustrating. I’m not sure how I finished that game without breaking something – probably because I knew it wasn’t a problem with the game, but a problem with me. It seems the more I turn a critical eye to what I read and play the more I come to grasp not only the elements of writing, but elements of myself as well. I didn’t even know that my dyslexia was effecting my reading as strongly as it was until I picked up Carol Berg’s Flesh and Spirit. It doesn’t come up often, so I forget that I do have this problem and that it does affect just about everything I do. It seems to me that instances like this one are good, as they remind me to pay attention to these things, to read carefully when something just doesn’t make sense, and to trust my instincts as well.
Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a wonderful game, the right mix of challenging and fun. I’m itching to save up to get the next in the series. Oh DS, why must you have so many wonderful games?