Layton’s Mystery Journey for Android

Enjoyed playing, but the puzzles don’t get difficult enough. And the stories are charming but there is SO MUCH DIALOGUE and the solutions of each case are pretty obvious from the beginning, so it’s a looot of clicking thru talking to find out what you already know. There is also an error on puzzle 101; the solution is the opposite of what is asked for. I thought I was just not getting it but found agreement from everyone online.

Some people have complained about too much dialogue, but the mundane mysteries are a worse problem. The “crimes” lack excitement, intensity or villains. Each mystery is neatly solved with everyone happy including the miscreant. Motives for any wrongdoing are not particularly interesting (loneliness, for example). Puzzles are OK, ranging from simplistic to interesting to impossible to solve without hints. The characters are cute though. Probably best for preteens.

Katrielle and Ernest should have kissed. This is an injustice that I cannot tolerate.

The user interface is slow and tedious, requiring tons of tapping and switching menus or screens. Much of the dialog is fluff, doled out in single sentences, each requiring two taps to get through, unless you wait for them to be slowly typed out and tap at the end. The first two mysteries are solved merely by tapping through the tedious interface. Most of the puzzles in that time are random rewards for tapping around the screen, with very few puzzles relating to the case in any way. After several hours of play, I just couldn’t be bothered to continue tapping my way through in hopes of finding something fun.

When I first started playing, I read every text bubble, but after awhile I got bored and rapid fire tapped through because there are literally no puzzles to be solved for majority of the stories! Even then, I’m left tapping the screen 10 or 20 times to skip all the filler dialogue!