Profesor Layton

The games employ an integrated structure of adventure-style exploration, dialogue sequences, and regular story-prompted puzzle solving.

The player (as Professor Layton, Luke, and other characters) explores their environment in the manner of a point-and-click adventure game, using the touch screen to talk with non-player characters, learn more about the environment, or locate hidden secrets such as hint coins that may be used during puzzles.

Often, when interacting with a person or object, the player will be presented with a puzzle, valued at a certain number of picarats, a type of point system within the game.

Solving the puzzle correctly will earn the player that many picarats, but a wrong answer will initially reduce the value a small amount on subsequent attempts down to a minimal picarat number.

In order to progress the plot, the player is required to solve specific puzzles, or to solve a minimum number of puzzles.

If the player permanently leaves an area or otherwise significantly progresses the plot, puzzles they have yet to find and/or solve are regularly compiled and placed into a collection, often in the form of a Puzzle Shack owned by a character known as Granny Riddleton, or with the aforementioned Riddleton's cat, Keats, which they can return to and attempt to resolve later.

Curious Village contains a total of 135 regular puzzles, while Diabolical Box contains 153, Unwound Future 168 , Last Specter 170, Miracle Mask 150 , Azran Legacy 165, and Millionaires' Conspiracy 185.

The puzzles take the form of brain teasers, most of which are only loosely tied to the plot, developed for the first six games under the oversight of Akira Tago, famous for his best-selling Mental Gymnastics series.

They encompass a diverse range of styles, from logic puzzles to lateral thinking problems, mazes, math problems, sliding-block puzzles, and various others.

The games give the player the opportunity to bring up a translucent memo screen they can write on using the stylus to work out their answer before submission. If the player is stuck, they may spend one hint coin to receive a hint.

Each puzzle has three regular hints available, and, from the third game onwards, feature super hints that tend towards nearly solving the puzzle for the player, but which can only be bought with two hint coins and after the three other hints have been revealed.

The puzzles are not timed, though some require correct timing, and others, such as mazes and sliding puzzles, may challenge the player to achieve completion in a limited number of moves.

Each game features an additional set of three unique meta-puzzle minigames that can be accessed at any time through the pause menu Layton's Trunk.

These minigames generally require the player to complete specific puzzles in the game to receive items and/or challenges within the minigame.

For example, in return for solving particular puzzles, characters in Curious Village will award the player with an item of furniture, which then must be placed within a set of apartments to Layton's and Luke's exacting desires; the minigame cannot be completed until all the furniture has been collected.

Completing the story and minigames also unlocks a series of especially difficult puzzles, known as Layton's Challenges.

Prior to its cancellation, players of the four DS games could use the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service to connect to the internet and access a weekly puzzle service, whereby they could download a new puzzle for each week following a game's release for a set period; later mainline 3DS games would expand on this with a year-long daily puzzle service via the Nintendo Network.

Professor Layton is a puzzle adventure video game series and transmedia franchise developed by Level-5.

The property consists primarily of seven main video games, a mobile spin-off, an animated theatrical film, and an anime television series, while additionally incorporating an array of secondary titles and media including a crossover game with Capcom's Ace Attorney series.

The first three games follow the adventures of Professor Hershel Layton and his apprentice Luke Triton, while the subsequent three games and film are prequels, focusing on how Luke and Layton met and their original exploits.

Later installments follow the escapades of Layton's children and their respective allies in settings old and new. Each title features a series of puzzles and mysteries provided by the citizens of locales that the main characters explore.

It is not necessary to solve all the puzzles to progress, but some are mandatory, and at certain points in the game a minimum number of puzzles must be solved before the story can continue.

Layton series games had shipped over 17 million units by June 2018,[2] making it the company's best-selling game franchise.