How Professor Layton and the Curious Village reminds us of Sunday night homework
Professor Layton and the Curious Village (2008)
Professor Layton and the Curious Village (2008)
Hate to dredge up old childhood trauma on you here, but do you remember those awful old schooldays, when you’d be struggling badly with your homework? It’s dark out, Sunday night, your strict teacher is expecting perfection from you the following morning, and the time for fun and games is definitely over.
I have to think that this is generally a universal memory. The frightful alternative, of course, is that you had the kind of parents who just didn’t give a hoot about your education and whether your homework was done, in which case, I’m truly sorry for you.
But for the rest of us, faced with impossible homework to complete, things weren’t too rosy. Speaking for myself, I tried to stay ahead of the curve as best as I could, so that I could get the business done by myself.
Thankfully, my parents left school at probably the same age they took up smoking, which is to say, aged 13 or so. They aren’t too fluent in Irish grammar or how photosynthesis works, let’s say. Plus I was an insufferable, know-it-all swot in school anyway, which I’m sure you couldn’t tell.
Christ, though, I really feel for those kids who needed help with their Maths homework. And it’s an interesting thing, the subject of Maths. At some point, every student starts questioning the usefulness of Maths. In my experience, this usually happens once algebra enters the fray.
However, I would argue that Maths is the most relevant school subject of all. Maths is all around us, every single angle, every width and breadth and depth. Maths governs everything in adult daily life, from DIY to your personal taxes, down to your car’s fuel economy and the price of a pint.
Sadly, because Maths is so practical, it means your dad is extremely well-versed in the subject, which means he’s only too willing to offer his assistance. And by all accounts, that’s when you really become a blubbering wreck, cowering in the corner as your dad screams geometry theories at you.
They’ll shout all kinds of rhetorical questions at you, imploring you to tell them why you don’t understand. Then they’ll sit next to you, waiting for you to write down the next line of the maths problem, which you are guaranteed to get wrong, and the atmosphere is absolutely poisonous.
Whatever money they pay to psychoanalysts and counsellors in prisons and mental institutions, they can stop it right now. If you really want to know how a young soul goes off the rails, then this is it. You can usually trace it all back to parental trauma - and there’s no finer, more distilled example of this than when they try to “help” you with homework. Why can’t we just leave certain people to be ignorant in peace?
Do you know how to prove De Moivre’s theorem? I don’t know either, but I’m pretty sure you don’t do it by shouting at somebody until they somehow write down the correct answer. You need a bit of understanding and patience to be a teacher, you know, and parents often seem to lack these particular nuances.
It’s a trauma that many young souls will go on to endure again, when it comes time to learn how to drive. I can perhaps spare a bit of sympathy for parents here; this time, they’ll usually have some skin in the game, their own car, or at least one they paid for. But when the car is moving at speed and your child is struggling to tell accelerator from brake from glove compartment, is the best course of action really to shout bloody murder at them?
Perhaps try a softer approach? After all, none of us likes being told we’re wrong, especially when we get it spectacularly wrong. But that’s all I ever seemed to do in Professor Layton and the Curious Village for Nintendo DS, the first in a long-running series.
In fact I once tried to work out how many Professor Layton games there were, mathematically, and I came up with the answer of two million, remainder twenty-three. I was happy with that, until my dad caught sight of my work, began bellowing at me, and made me do it again.
After a half-hour of him watching me like a hawk, I came up with the answer that there were only six or seven Layton games, roughly. This was deemed good enough… for now. But who cares, really? The first instalment is always the winner in these cases.
Developed by masters of the sleeper hit, Level-5, and published by Nintendo, this really is a quintessentially DS game. You play as a duo, Professor Layton and his young charge Luke. I’m going to just assume that Layton is Luke’s rich uncle or babysitter or something; the alternative is too ghastly to consider. And anyway, this is a wholesome game, whatever that means.
You’re there to investigate some strange goings-on in the village of St. Mystere, and along the way, the duo will locate the mysterious Golden Apple. You could call it a very PG version of Sherlock Holmes or Indiana Jones. Half of the game is a visual novel, whereas the other half is the real meat and bones of the game - the puzzles.
There are over 100 puzzles in the game to solve, ranging from logic puzzles, optical illusions, numeric puzzles, mazes, all kinds of brainbusters like that. The game works beautifully with the DS stylus, if you can keep ownership of one for long enough - and lord knows I can’t. You use the touch-screen to write your answer down, or circle the right area, and then submit your work for the grand reveal.
God, though, you feel embarrassed when you get it wrong. And you will get it wrong at some stage, even when you use the plentiful Hint Coins to get some help, which are nearly always perfectly written and localised. There are very few times when a puzzle answer is revealed and you find yourself shaking your head at how stupid or obtuse it was.
That’s not to say you won’t be resorting to a bit of the old guesswork at times, though. You’ll be there all confident and full of yourself, submitting the answer of ‘4’, only for your character to facepalm at your idiocy. No problem, you know that if it ain’t 4, it’s gotta be 5. Nope, that’s wrong too. 6? As if. 3…?
Now you’re just reaching, grasping pathetically at straws. It’s a bit like the classic pitfall when you’ve just come out of an exam, and you’ve started asking others what answer they got for a certain question. I’m telling you, you should never, ever do the exam post-mortem. You’ll feel dreadful whey tell you their answer was 6, when you got minus 42.
As I understand it, the main inspiration and contributor behind this cute little game was a Japanese puzzle master named Akira Tagot. In his lifetime, he created over a dozen best-selling puzzle books. No, he didn’t invent sudoku, but I bet he beat the newspaper’s daily sudoku puzzle in record time, each and every day. And I bet he wasn’t a tyrant to his kids when they’d ask him for help with their homework, either.
23 February 2024