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Layton Brothers: Mystery Room Game Review

Layton Brothers: Mystery Room is a 2012 puzzle adventure video game published by Level-5 for Android and other mobile devices. It’s an interesting, but flawed experiment.

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“Eh. Potty Prof is back“

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This was the only entry in the Layton series not to star Hershel himself or Luke or any other famous character from the titular series. It’s also the only installment that isn’t a puzzle, but rather more of an adventure game starring different characters. It was released to solid reviews and it’s well regarded, but to me it just felt too different from the mainline series.

It’s a spin-off that is all about detective work. It’s a mystery adventure that has its puzzle elements, but certainly not to the extent of the original series. The game consists of nine cases that you have to solve, making you feel as if you are in an Agatha Christie story or something. Each case starts with the basic facts, hints and assumptions and then it moves to a recreated scene that tasks you to search for crucial clues.

This investigation mostly consists of going through the area with your cursor, looking for clues, valuable data and important objects. Basically, you need to scan the entire area in order to progress properly. You examine the circumstances surrounding the victim’s death, weapons involved and you have to answer some multiple choice questions regarding these points as well.

This is rather easy in the first couple of cases, but increasingly difficult later down the line, even becoming quite hard in the last couple of cases. After the investigation, there comes the interrogative section of case solving. This is where you interrogate a suspect through presenting crucial piece of information or again answering multiple choice questions. This was my favorite part of the game for two reasons. Firstly, the fact that you can easily make a mistake without losing was a great choice as it made the game more palatable. Secondly, watching the suspects lose composure and start sweating and nervously yelling at you was immensely satisfying.

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Overall, the gameplay is fine for what it is. It involved too much reading and it required a lot of patience from the player due to its sluggish pace and cases that are definitely overlong and some can’t even be solved in a single sitting. Most of these cases were either too easy or too hard to solve due to the game’s frustratingly uneven difficulty curve. And it simply felt repetitious going through the same routes to solving each crime, making the game tiresome after only a couple of cases.

But where Layton Brothers excels at is in the storytelling and characterization. This is the only area where it almost reached the level of quality of the original franchise. Yes, most of the cases aren’t too interesting, but some are intriguing and the overarching arc with the main villain Justin Lawson and the professor’s double persona was quite well written and solidly diverting.

Lucy Baker is a memorable sidekick similar to Emmy from the original series. Her Cockney accent was fun and it made me wish that the game featured genuine voice acting. It seemed rather cheap in its choice to only feature dialogue through bubbles. But still, that dialogue was superb and surprisingly well written. It ranged from serious to witty to delightfully playful. Lucy is a great accomplice to Alfendi Layton himself, who is the son of Hershel. The game failed to connect him to the original franchise properly, but at least the character himself was superb. He was very memorable in his cocky and goofy persona and his backstory was quite interesting too.

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Layton Brothers doesn’t have a lot going for it after you finish all nine cases. In fact, it has nothing to offer besides the main campaign, which was an issue for me as Layton games usually offer a ton of side activities to do. Visually, it’s polished and well designed in its characters in particular, but it lacked animated cutscenes, dialogue and true 3D scenes, making for a rather limited look overall. The sound effects are also only okay while the jazzy score is great at first, but it quickly becomes monotonous and repetitive. The game is too short at just around eight hours and it simply wasn’t all that entertaining to me despite its obvious strengths.