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Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box Game Review

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box is a 2007 puzzle adventure video game developed by Nintendo for the Nintendo DS. It’s an inferior, but still pretty good sequel.

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“She never stopped loving you“

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‘The Curios Village’ came out in 2007 and it was tremendous. This sequel came out the same year in Japan and it once again received strong reviews, but to me it’s weaker than the original game for a couple of reasons. The main one is that the games are too similar to each other with this sequel not introducing enough improvements to stand on its own.

The storytelling continues to be one of the best aspects of this franchise. Although I preferred the plot of the previous game, this one also includes a terrific twist that makes sense in context of the story and the whole atmosphere is still one full of charm, though it’s also more eerie this time around.

The titular box is said to kill everybody who opens it, so the professor and Luke must solve this mystery. They first go on The Molentary Express train. Then, they visit Dropstone village. Finally, the duo has to solve the mysteries of the creepy town called Folsence. Yes, the game is set in three different places and all three were so well established and explored that I admired how ambitious this project was.

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I loved the scenes on the train as it was all so British and charmingly posh as Luke himself would constantly point out. The Dropstone village wonderfully contrasted Folsence in its beautifully sun-drenched, positive vibes. As for Folsence, I found its dark alleys pleasantly creepy while actually exploring the forest and eventually the castle was unexpected and so much fun.

The twist with Anton and the town all being just an illusion worked so well and again the ending was very touching. Luke and Layton continue to be a fantastic duo and the main villain is back, though in a reduced role. But the sidelining of Flora was disappointing. Overall, the game needed more memorable supporting characters.

Diabolical Box is pretty much the same in terms of its puzzle adventure gameplay as the original with only some slight differences. You get 138 puzzles in total, which is a commendable number, and also some additional puzzles after the game’s completion. The controls, interface and the whole gameplay experience is very smooth with an excellent save progress feature.

But I’ve had one big problem with this sequel and that is its staggering difficulty level. Perhaps I am dumb, but personally I found many of the puzzles here not only hard, but ridiculously so. Too many of them required from you to draw things. The added memo feature made this easier, but still for a game that should be simpler and more straightforward, this was a needless complication.

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Once again the ball sliding puzzles were my favorites. I loved those, though they were too easy, which also annoyed me as the puzzles that I am actually good at got reduced in difficulty. The new puzzles that are about guiding a figure through snow or opening water valves were the other highlights. But other than those, others are all pretty much the same as before, only much harder. The difficulty is also uneven as it’s very easy at first and then becoming way too hard very quickly.

What this sequel actually does better than the original is the mini-games. I loved all three of those. Making tea for the town’s residents was the most difficult of these games. It requires first getting the ingredients and then mixing them together to create just the right mixture. The explanations did help, but still this process could become taxing. Still, the idea was excellent and fittingly British for this franchise.

Collecting pieces of a camera and repairing the camera was also a fun mini-game that was very well constructed, especially the end part where you have to find differences between two photographs, but my favorite has to be the hamster mini-game. Wow, this side game was truly special. It was, in fact, the best part of the entire game to be honest. Getting the hamster to run and become slimmer by positioning certain items that are treats for him was brilliantly executed and it was just so much fun. It wasn’t too easy or too difficult, but just right. Eventually, the little guy helps you find hint coins, which was another big plus.

In terms of the visuals, Diabolical Box is just as lovely as its predecessor. Everything here looks splendid from the animation to the art direction to the terrific character design. The world building is phenomenal and the game’s cutscenes are again stunningly made. The animation is gorgeous, but some of the action scenes in those cutscenes were fantastic with the sword fight being particularly strong.

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The voice acting was reliably phenomenal and again endearingly British and over-the-top. As for the music, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the original too, so this one mostly repeating the same beats and being repetitious in a lot of its compositions remained an issue for me. But the dialogue was great and the game runs smoothly on the emulator with excellent controls per usual. The game is also quite long with more puzzles this time around, which was quite welcome.