I just got the latest Professor Layton game, Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. I haven’t played too much yet, but here’s what’s happened so far:
Professor Layton and his apprentice Luke were invited to a banquet, where a creepy-looking scientist demonstrated his new invention: a time machine. He asks the Prime Minister of Britain to test out the time machine, pulls the lever, and…boom! The time machine explodes, and the Prime Minister and Creepy Scientist disappear.
Professor Layton then gets a letter from ten years in the future, saying the world is in trouble, and they need Professor Layton’s help. This letter is signed by Future Luke.
Luke and Layton follow the instructions in the letter, which involves visiting a clock shop, and they get taken to…THE FUTURE! At least, it seems like it’s the future. All the streets and buildings have changed, and the dates are all ahead by ten years. Everybody in town seems leery of Professor Layton’s top hat, although no one has said why yet.
Our heroes just got a second letter from Future Luke, which says to go to a hospital. They have nothing else to do, so they decide to go there. That’s as far as I’ve played.
An artist’s depiction of Future Luke. Picture by Colin Greenhalgh.
Now, the other Professor Layton games have come up with ridiculous explanations for their mysteries. In the first game, everyone in town is a robot. In the second game, the entire town is a gas-induced hallucination. So obviously, Professor Layton isn’t really in the future. There is a perfectly logical, i.e. totally ridiculous, explanation for what’s going on.
So far, I have come up with the following possible explanations for what’s happened:
- The Prime Minister is a robot.
- The Prime Minister is a kangaroo in disguise. He didn’t disappear; he just hopped away.
- The Prime Minister is a robot kangaroo.
- The Prime Minister is a robot kangaroo from France.
- The scientist who invented the time machine didn’t really invent a time machine. This was all part of his scheme to kidnap the Prime Minister and…I dunno, make him reveal his French robotic kangaroo secrets.
- The letters from “Future Luke” are actually from someone named “Fred Lynch”; he just has really, really bad handwriting.
- “Future Luke” is really Luke’s father, who has teamed up with Professor Layton’s arch-nemesis, Don Paolo, to take over the world by kidnapping the Prime Minister. Or something like that.
- While Luke and Layton were inside the clock shop, a tornado came and took them to the Land of Oz.
- Everyone is scared of Professor Layton’s top hat because there is a rabbit hiding inside.
- This is all part of an elaborate April Fools’ Day joke.
I’ll keep you guys updated with the plot of the game as it goes along, but for now, it seems like an interesting mystery! Also, the puzzles have all been good so far, except for the train station one, which was total nonsense and impossible to figure out without guessing because the puzzle description was poorly worded. I had to resort to random guessing, and it took four wrong answers before I got it right. I say they replace that puzzle in later copies of the game. The other puzzles were good, though.
[Reprinted from the blog of former GameCola staff writer Michael Gray.]
