Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask

Professor Layton is a franchise that has never needed constant revamps to work well. Its games, after all, are about only two things: their story and puzzles – and two puzzles are never the same. The fact that Miracle Mask doesn’t do much to reinvent the wheel, then, is far from a problem, as it still offers the franchise’s best story after The Unwound Future, and a large number of puzzles to solve.

Miracle Mask begins with Professor Layton being called by a former friend to the town of Monte D’Or, which is being terrorized by a mysterious fellow called the Masked Gentleman. After arriving in town during carnival festivities, Layton is witness to one of the villain’s infamous appearances, as the Masked Gentleman proceeds to transform a portion of his audience into stone statues. The investigation then begins.

Layton games have always tried to have a “heart”, as deep inside the haunted cities the professor visits there are touching characters with tragic backgrounds related to problems that arise from love – be it paternal, platonic, or lost. Miracle Mask’s main theme is friendship, with the characters discussing its value, while insisting on making mistakes that jeopardize it.

The game contains a fair number of flashbacks exposing Layton’s past, focusing on why he became an archaeologist, offering a story as personal as that of the excellent The Unwound Future, with all the benefits this approach brings: Professor Layton is often a far more fascinating character than his colleagues, thanks to his high level of introspection that hides a traumatized persona. His duality is further reinforced by the main shades of his outfit – an intellectual brown covering a warm orange – that reflect how his placid demeanor is concealing a whirlwind of emotions.

The narrative’s structure is simple and episodic, marked by the so-called Dark Miracles the Masked Gentleman performs, in which people are turned to stone or start to float and disappear. After witnessing them, the professor visits old friends to try to understand the villain’s motivation and unravel what’s behind the fiend’s hatred for the city of Monte D’Or.  But despite the apparent supernatural aspect of the dark miracles, which Layton works tirelessly to disprove, the story turns out to be one of the more grounded in the series –this time there are no dinosaurs facing giant robots at the climax, for example. Rather, it prefers to subtly explore the various facets of its characters, ensuring that it doesn’t need preposterous plot twists or set pieces to make an impact.

Staying true to the series tradition, Miracle Mask also expands its main themes through the extravagant inhabitants of Monte D’Or and their special quirks. The true nature of the Masked Gentleman’s miracles is well represented by the city’s circus performers, for instance – the fact that the aspiring clown Stumble keeps getting entangled in his own balloons serves as a subtle metaphor for the villain’s tragic trajectory – while more general themes like greed and carelessness towards a loved one are reflected by specific characters, such as the fat tycoon Sterling, whose thirst for money blinds him to his wife’s intentions, and the relapsed mother Tanya, who always loses sight of her daughter while observing the city’s landscapes.

As for the puzzles, they remain as consistent and challenging as ever. Their diversity is still abundant, varying from the purely logical ones (“Considering that the numbers 1130, 1231, 0131, 0228 follow a pattern, what would be the next number?”), to those that innocently presume we are capable of imagining three-dimensional geometric figures, cutting them up, and then forming other figures with the resulting parts, among many other types of puzzles. Some even offer a peculiar context to its riddle:

“This unusual Ferris wheel is adorned with a letter of the alphabet in its center and on every cabin. The letter in the center is [S] and the cabins, when read in a clockwise direction, go like so: [J], [M], [E], [V], [M], [N], [U], and [?]. According to the fairground worker, there used to be a letter instead of the [?], but he can’t seem to remember what it was. He only knows that the letters obeyed some sort of rule. Can you find out what which letter used to be in the [?] cabin? ”

The difficulty of the puzzles is still measured by the amount of “Picarats” each one offers – the currency used to unlock extras – and it can range from 25 Picarats, such as this Ferris wheel puzzle, to more than a hundred.

Despite being the franchise’s fifth title, Miracle Mask changes very little of the basic structure of the series: the player will be exploring the environments to find puzzles or proceed with the story. The new features it does introduce have the sole purpose of adding a little more action to the adventure, such as horse racing and a Zelda-ish section of cave exploration. Admittedly, both activities would have benefited from the use of the Circle Pad – using the stylus to move a horse is anything but intuitive – and are very far from being complex or original – everyone who has ever played any Zelda has already pushed enough giant blocks onto pressure plates for an entire lifetime –, yet they are brief, harmless affairs intended to just shake things up.

The most notable change is about exploration: before Miracle Mask, the player used the Stylus to traverse and explore the environments through the touchscreen as typical point-and-click: we had to touch everything on the screen to find puzzles and secrets. Now, the stylus is used to move a magnifying glass that shines only at points of interest, making the player’s life easier and everything flow more quickly.

Miracle Mask also lives up to the series’ reputation regarding its presentation. The art direction remains extraordinary: the city of Monte D’Or is richly drawn in the background – the powerful 3D effect giving it even more life – and the character models, now three-dimensional, retain the charm provided by the eccentricity of their designs. The soundtrack, in turn, continues to be one of the best in the medium, using the most varied instruments – from violin to the trumpet – to convey the melancholy atmosphere of a contradictory, yet glamorous city built on the ruins of broken friendships.

Offering over four hundred puzzles, Miracle Mask features a respectable amount of content, a top-notch presentation, and a tragic and touching story of loss and reconciliation. Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask is a game that never aims to innovate, but only to raise its series’ overall quality – a decision that proves to be quite correct. After all, a true gentleman knows that certain things don’t need to change.

September 20, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on June 04, 2015.