Professor Layton and the Unwound Future

The Good
The illustrations, characters, animations and music are great. Especially the soundtrack is very cool. The title theme and puzzle theme are more or less the same as the in previous games, but there are many new tracks as well.

The game is well presented and the menus are easy to navigate, it works in the same way as in "Curious Village" and "Pandora's Box" which is good.

The autosave feature works seamlessly and when you continue a saved game it shows "the story so far" with a few illustrations and key elements of the story. Typically you'll play the game spread out over a few days (or even weeks) so these short recaps are a nice touch.

The Bad
I thought the puzzles were a little too easy and also there wasn't as much variation in puzzles as in the earlier games. Most of the puzzles are multiple choice or answer input, where there is one still image and a short story with clues, and all you have to do is circle or type in the right anwser.

There are parrot delivery and toy car puzzles which are more interactive but they are not part of the story puzzles. You find these puzzles throughout the story mode and they are relegated as mini games available in the trunk menu. Also, when you want to try a solution in the toy car puzzles it switches from grid view to an isometric view. The isometric view and animation looks nice but this switching back and forth slows down the pace of the game.

The story builds up nicely at first but about two-thirds into the game it just gets too ridiculous, even compared to the stories in "Curious Village" and "Pandora's Box". I personally thought it jumps the shark here.

The Bottom Line
Average puzzles and an unconvincing story, I'd recommend "Curious Village" or "Pandora's Box" instead.