At the start of “Professor Layton and the Unwound Future,” the third game in Nintendo’s venerable brainteasing franchise, the good professor’s apprentice, Luke, receives a letter from himself 10 years into the future. The letter may not warn him about the Libyan terrorists he stole plutonium from to power his DeLorean, but it does set our boy hero and the titular prof on another adventure solving a plethora of puzzles in a charming Victorian world.
But while the story is all about the future, the game that accompanies it is stuck in the past. There’s still an overarching mystery, which you solve by tapping on static scenes to search for clues; there is still a beautiful art style, like someone commissioned Hayao Miyazaki to combine the aesthetic of “Tintin” and “Caillou”; and there are still brainteasers at every turn, often presented by random strangers who say things like “Isn’t this a majestic tree? This reminds me of a puzzle!”
Unlike other puzzle games, which engage you over and over in one game design, the “Professor Layton” series promises that each challenge that brings you closer to the denouement will be different. One minute you’re finding a path through a maze, the next you’re solving a word-based logic puzzle, the next you’re deducing “Which of these is not like the other?” There’s nothing wrong with this formula, but it feels stale this time. Perhaps the series is proving the adage that what’s given too freely is valued too lightly, the victim of a new-installment-every-year release cycle that curses successful franchises, and maybe the game would be more fun if I hadn’t played its predecessors so recently, but some of the puzzles in “Unwound Future” feel repetitive and unimaginative. A 6 can become a 9 if you look at it upside down? Holy cow!
Fans of logic puzzles and spatial reasoning will find a lot to love in this game, but hopefully in the future, Nintendo will give us more time to unwind — and get excited — between releases.
