Curiouser & curiouser...

Professor Layton & The Curious Village is not a kid's game. It should be rated M for Mature, because it requires a certain masochistic tolerance for intense frustration caused by small cute mysteries, which probably explains why 64% of players who admit to owning this thing are women. Obviously, one can crack the case, which is only plastic, with a ball peen hammer, but the game (and we) should have expected more adult behavior — concentration, critical thought, sense of whimsy, twisty deviousness of mind... Well, you get the idea. It's a puzzle palace.

Most of the really good roleplaying games have a puzzle here and there that you have to solve — "How do I get out of this maze?" and the like. This is not like that. Professor Layton's oddball adventure with his trusty sidekick "kid" (I can't remember the little thug's name) is composed ENTIRELY of puzzles, bunches of puzzles, MORE puzzles than any normal person should want — and not only the puzzle obstacles that advance the plot (what?), but OPTIONAL puzzles that infest every corner of the game. HARD puzzles. Some easy puzzles, sure, but most of them are unfair to four year olds, and some of them are downright breezy about insulting the cognitive armament of braindamaged old coots like me.

You've SEEN some of these puzzles, like in old issues of Scientific American and the like. They're OLD, for the most part. Most of them are older than the hills. To wit:

"A river. On the left bank, three wolves and three sheep. A boat that can only hold two animals at once. If wolves outnumber the sheep, the sheep are lunch. How do you get all the wolves and all the sheep across the river? These are magical animals, apparently, that know how to row a boat, which won't move by itself. Cunning beasts, sure — but the sheep haven't mastered the art of gunsmithing, and the wolves haven't mastered the art of smiling diplomacy."

Nintendo forestalls wrong answers by animating this unpleasant scene for you. In their version, it's wolves and baby chickens, and it's a raft, but same idea. I read it in Weekly Reader over half a century ago, so that's the way I told the story, with sheep.

I gave up playing CASTLEVANIA for Lent? The Oxonian-toned Professor Whatsisname is far crueler and should be dealt with summarily.