Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask

Professor Layton is a franchise that never needed constant revamps to work. Its games, after all, are about only two things: their story and puzzles – and two puzzles are never the same. The fact that The 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.

The 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 the 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”: deep inside the haunted cities the professor visits there are touching characters with tragic backgrounds surrounding the problems that arise from love – be it paternal, platonic, or lost. The Miracle Mask’s main theme is friendship, with the characters discussing its value while the events show the mistakes people insist on making that lead them to lose their friends.

The game contains a fair number of flashbacks exposing Layton’s past and why he became an archaeologist. The game, therefore, offers a story as personal as that of the excellent The Unwound Future, with all the benefits this brings: Professor Layton is a far more fascinating character than his colleagues, thanks to his high level of introspection that hides a traumatized persona. His duality is reinforced by the main shades of his outfit – an intellectual brown covering a warm orange –, further increasing the player’s interest in his story.

The narrative’s structure is very simple and episodic, marked by the apparitions of the Masked Gentleman and his Dark Miracles. After each “miracle”, in which people are turned to stone or float and disappear, the professor visits old friends to unravel the villain’s plans, find out how such events actually occurred, and understand what’s behind the fiend’s hatred for the city of Monte D’Or.

The story turns out to be less absurd than usual: 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 to work: the story being very predictable, then, is never a serious issue.

Staying true to the franchise tradition, The 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 – and 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 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 (Considering that the numbers 1130, 1231, 0131, 0228 follow a pattern, what would be the next number?), to those that tell a brief tale to contextualize the puzzle and throw you some red herrings:

“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? ”

There are puzzles that are about moving blocks in a limited space and those that innocently believe that the player is able to imagine three-dimensional geometric figures, cut them, and form other figures with the resulting parts, among many other types of puzzles. The difficulty is still measured by the amount of “Picarats” offered – the currency used to unlock extras – and it can range from 25 Picarats, such as the Ferris wheel puzzle, to more than a hundred.

Despite being the franchise’s fifth title, The Miracle Mask changes very little of the basic structure of the series: the player will be exploring the environments to find puzzles or proceed in the story. The new features it does introduce have the sole purpose of adding a little more action to the adventure.

These additions are 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 into devices for a lifetime –, yet they are brief, harmless affairs. Most notable is the gameplay change regarding exploration: before The Miracle Mask, the player used the Stylus to traverse and explore the environments through the touchscreen and 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.

The Miracle Mask also lives up to the franchise’s 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 fabulous, 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, The 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 the franchise’s overall quality; a decision that proves to be quite successful. After all, a true gentleman knows when certain things don’t need to change.

September 20, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on June 04, 2015.