the OG puzzle-solving adventure !!! i first heard about this game when an artist i followed on deviantART posted a (spoiler-free) reaction to the game's ending, and my curiosity was piqued. i refused to just look up the ending though, and instead asked for the game for Christmas. come Christmas day, my poor family had to deal with me intermittently reading out various puzzles from the game to see if they were able to solve them. we spent over an hour scratching our heads over 'The Camera and the Case', which unilaterally baffled and infuriated us all :')

i talk a lot about formative games, and Professor Layton and the Curious Village is no exception. it was formative for me in a very different sense, however. i was 11 when i first played Curious Village, and spent the next handful of years obsessively playing and replaying the games in the series. i spent hours of my tweenage years shifting my thinking to approach the game's many logic puzzles from a different perspective, and -- though there's no definitive way to prove this -- i think it fundamentally altered the way that i think and problem solve. the game consistently encourages if not outright requires lateral thinking skills, and to this day it's a skill that i've been complimented on. i am very, very good at dingbat puzzles at the local pub quiz lmao :')