It’s been out in America since February and out in Japan for over 18 months – Professor Layton and the Curious Village finally gets a UK release this week. The premise, if you’ve missed the TV and magazine adverts and extensive column inches, is that the good professor, our top hat-wearing, puzzle solving hero has been invited to St. Mystere, Village of Mystery along with his annoying sidekick Luke and Luke’s Dick Van Dyke tour-of-the-regions British accent. Unfortunately the residents of St. Mystere have no interest in talking about the mysteriousness of their village until the Professor has answered one or many of the puzzles they all seem to collect.

It’s a great game. Level 5 could have just gone the Brain Training route and presented us with a load of puzzles and told us that solving them would improve us in some kind of nebulous way. Instead they have made a game in which the puzzle-solving becomes integral to the clever, involving story. The story side of things succeeds thanks both to good writing with lots of nice ‘Aha!’ moments of revelation as the plot unfolds and to the animation which is rendered in glorious 2D and has a lovely Studio Ghibli charm to it. So much so, actually, that you’ll begin to wonder why it is that cut scene animation in other DS games is so lacklustre.

The puzzles are well-pitched – occasionally easy, occasionally frustrating but generally just right. They’re also sufficiently varied that each one requires a different approach so completing them isn’t a case of just getting into the right puzzle-solving mindset and repeating a hundred or so times. There are water jug puzzles, chess puzzles, spatial puzzles, maths puzzles, puzzles which require lateral thinking and puzzles that will require a large amount of time and a pen and paper. Thankfully for the particularly difficult ones there’s also an option to ‘buy’ up to three hints with coins you collect from around the village. This, along with the occasional puzzles hidden in objects around the village also adds a good bit of silliness as the very well-bred, well dressed Professor wanders around the village making polite conversation, solving puzzles and poking everything in site on the offchance it has something hidden inside it.

It’s also packed to the gunnels with extra stuff. There’s a minigame where you can cheer up the Professor and Luke by filling their rooms with furniture and personal effects (“Hello there, Mr Bear! Ha ha ha!” Luke says, if you’ll let him). There are extra hard puzzles that you can unlock at the end and, at least in the American version, DLC with new puzzles. All in all it’s pretty, it’s clever and it’s been done properly.

There are only two flies in this otherwise delicious ointment. First the name. I don’t now if this is just me but I find something compulsively forgettable about the name Professor Layton and the Curious Village. I’m aware that this may say more about me than the title of the game, but for months I could only think of it as Peter Frampton and the Bi-curious Village. This may be a niche problem, admittedly. Second, and more damningly, is the irritating sidekick and his terrible accent – there are people in the world who can do convincing British accents. In Britain for starters. While it’s offputting, though, it’s not a fatal flaw. Sonic II managed to be an entertaining game despite its pointless sidekick so we can just as surely overlook the Tails in this Top Hat and Tails pairing.

OK, I might as well just come out and say it: I didn’t like Fallout 3.

I’ll write a proper post on this one later, but I just had to get it out there.

I feel better already.