I like math puzzles and often find myself solving IQ Test ads (but not actually clicking on them), so this game piqued my curiosity. I wasn't sure I
wanted to put down $30 for it, though, but I picked it up with a couple Best Buy coupons. 13 hours and three days later I finished 116 of the default 120
puzzles, and put the painting and robot dog together.
Maybe I was trying to cram too much of the game into too small a time frame (I was solving about 39 puzzles a day), but towards the end I started getting burned out. I'm sure it didn't help when I ran into a couple puzzles I had to use Hint Coins on not because I really needed a hint, but because I couldn't figure out what the hell I was even supposed to do, or had to clear up ambiguous directions. For example, there's a puzzle very near the end of the game where you have to draw seven squares on a pegboard, and in the rules it only says you can only use each peg once, but it doesn't say you have to use ALL the pegs, or how you're even supposed to draw the squares (like, if you made a cross with two rectangles, would that count as five squares?)
And there's the backstory, which I honestly did not give two shits about and plodding through all that crap may also be part of my exhaustion later in the game. The only two characters with any dimension to them are Layton and Luke, and even then they're hardly deep. They're like two puffy stickers in a town of paper dolls. I'm not sure if everyone's one note personality was an intentional hint at the secret of St. Mystere, but this wasn't like Phoenix Wright where you seriously cared about getting Edgeworth off the murder hook because you found out under that stuck-up bastard of a prosecutor was a decent, confused man. The game documents all the "mysteries" which I never read because, as I said before, I didn't give a rat's ass but it's not like you have to think about them because you scale the tower Layton explains them all. And I don't know what they expected me to feel by the ending, but what I felt was mostly indifference, broken up by one or two fits of laughter at how absurd everything was.
Go for the puzzles (and I might suggest taking your time), not the story.
Maybe I was trying to cram too much of the game into too small a time frame (I was solving about 39 puzzles a day), but towards the end I started getting burned out. I'm sure it didn't help when I ran into a couple puzzles I had to use Hint Coins on not because I really needed a hint, but because I couldn't figure out what the hell I was even supposed to do, or had to clear up ambiguous directions. For example, there's a puzzle very near the end of the game where you have to draw seven squares on a pegboard, and in the rules it only says you can only use each peg once, but it doesn't say you have to use ALL the pegs, or how you're even supposed to draw the squares (like, if you made a cross with two rectangles, would that count as five squares?)
And there's the backstory, which I honestly did not give two shits about and plodding through all that crap may also be part of my exhaustion later in the game. The only two characters with any dimension to them are Layton and Luke, and even then they're hardly deep. They're like two puffy stickers in a town of paper dolls. I'm not sure if everyone's one note personality was an intentional hint at the secret of St. Mystere, but this wasn't like Phoenix Wright where you seriously cared about getting Edgeworth off the murder hook because you found out under that stuck-up bastard of a prosecutor was a decent, confused man. The game documents all the "mysteries" which I never read because, as I said before, I didn't give a rat's ass but it's not like you have to think about them because you scale the tower Layton explains them all. And I don't know what they expected me to feel by the ending, but what I felt was mostly indifference, broken up by one or two fits of laughter at how absurd everything was.
Go for the puzzles (and I might suggest taking your time), not the story.
