Professor Layton and the Curious Village [DS]

WATCH PROFESSOR LAYTON TRAILER

Two flamenco guitarists board a bus headed north. If it's three o' clock in Georgia and five-thirty in Singapore, what color shoes are they wearing?

Stumped? Then clearly you've not spent enough time sharpening your wits with Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and for that, we must scold you. As charming as it is challenging, Nintendo's latest Japanese import is a delightful point-and-click adventure game overflowing with mind-bending puzzles and oozing with a unique sense of style.

Something is foul in the village of St. Mystere, and it's not the roast beef. The town's resident billionaire, Baron Augustus Reinhold, has passed, leaving the fate of his entire estate in the core of the elusive Golden Apple. Whoever locates the fruit gets a piece of the action, so to speak, but apparently Reinhold was a few notes short of a scale as nobody has even the vaguest idea where to find it.

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That's where you come in. As the brilliant Professor Layton and his young apprentice Luke, you'll scour the quaint St. Mystere for clues, chatting up the oddball locals to solve the baron's mystery. That might sound like a tall task, but the game's control scheme - stylus only, thank you - will let even the most casual of gamers through the gates. In a throwback to classic PC adventure games, simply tapping on the bottom screen lets you navigate St. Mystere, interact with its beautiful scenery and talk to the game's large cast of bizarre characters.

Who, it turns out, are gaga over puzzles. Though they're a bit inelegantly shoehorned into the story, the game's cranial centerpieces come fast and frequent. They're genuinely fun and often quite challenging, testing your critical thinking, spatial cognition, and overall reasoning skills. You're rewarded for solving puzzles in a few different ways (you'll need to have solved a certain number to keep the plot moving, for instance), but in truth, the solution is its own reward. By the time you've reached some of the higher-rated puzzles, you'll feel like sending your resume to Mensa.

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