Layton: Puzzles and Story

In an article over at GameSetWatch, Simon Carless criticizes the Professor Layton series of games, with a particular focus on the most recent iteration, Proferssor Layton and the Unwound Future, for awkwardly shoehorning the gameplay and story together such that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. This criticism seems to have two parts; that failure to integrate the story and gameplay leads these components to get in each other's way, and that it is incredibly contrived -- and disbelief reinstating -- to have the entire population of London chomping at the bit to offer you puzzles. I haven't finished that game, but so far the first part of his analysis tracks with my experience; I often find myself watching cutscenes which would be quite enjoyable if I weren't desperately wishing I was helping milkmaids equitably divide pastureland with three buckets and a bale of twine.

As for the second aspect of his criticism--that the transition between gameplay and story is awkward-- I am ambivalent. In the world of the Layton games, the most respected and brilliant man in the world devotes his life to the study of puzzles, presumably because this is something that people in this universe consider important enough to award PhDs (or DPhils, depending on where he matriculated). So it's no more outrageous that people in this puzzle-mad world give you puzzles than it is that random people in Chronicles of a Quest Foretold II: Dragon Community Center, to request that you murder the orcs that stole their mothers' lockets (clearly a proportionate response to petty theft). That being said, the criticism is not unwarranted, especially with regard to the last two games in the series, as the integration of the puzzles and story in Diabolical Box and Unwound Future could be just a bit more graceful.

By contrast, the first game in the series, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, combined the story and gameplay in a way I found to be a deceptively brilliant use of the artificiality and weirdness inherent in transitioning from story to gameplay. In the aforementioned generic RPG its actually kind of weird that random people ask you to run errands. We just don't notice because we are used to the conventions of the RPG genre, in which the story exists primarily to provide contexts for the battles.* Professor Layton, on the other hand, operating, as it does, in a genre which is usually devoid of narrative, has no choice but to make the difference between narrative context and gameplay extremely apparent. Instead of trying to hide this artificiality, Curious Village embraces it.

WARNING - when reading, watching or playing art, I tend to agree with those who think it is the reader, watcher or player's role to actively try and construct meaning out of the building blocks provided by the artist, rather than to simply be a passive observer. Some artists make this easy, generally by creating a work that lends itself to one interpretation, which is usually just the literal meaning of the work. Some artists make it harder to parse a meaning, generally through obscure symbolisms and the like (try reading Finnegans Wake, I dare you). The best artists do both: they provide layers of meaning that can be unpealed like an onion until one has found the layer that suits them best; one can enjoy the story and leave it at that, or one can probe further and find something else. One of the results of this approach is that I tend to have interpretations that, could be described as "interesting" if one is sympathetic, or, if one is not, as "complete ass-pulls."

Also there will be SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway, back to Layton. As we play the Curious Village we may be struck by how odd it is for the townsfolk to be so obsessed with puzzles. This is because the townsfolk are odd and obsessed with puzzles. But they are not odd for just the sake of oddness, nor are they odd because they are just a mechanic for providing puzzles to solve. Why then are they so odd? Because they are clockwork; their mechanical nature -- each "person" is an artificial system composed of perfectly interlocking parts -- mirrors the hermetic world of a puzzle, in which every piece is a necessary component and all pieces work together to create the solution, just like the gears of a clockwork hearts. Morever, the townfolk are also components in an even greater puzzle - the town itself. The town, a labyrinth worthy of Borges, is designed to protect Flora, the puzzlemakers daughter and the solution to his last and greatest puzzle. A puzzle is solved by a person worthy of its solution, almost by definition. By solving this labyrinth, Layton proves himself to be the worthy protector of Flora, the final puzzle's solution.

Story and game can serve each other, not simply through smooth integration, where the story and gameplay are interchangeable simply because by playing one engages in every act that is part of the story (for example, Doom is the story of a man shooting demons), but through thematic resonance. What do I mean by thematic resonance? I mean that the gameplay elements and story can interact in ways that go beyond simply being literal occurrences in game. Puzzles can provide compelling metaphors for soul-searching in Braid (I think that Jonathan Blow sells himself, and games in general, short in this regard) and they can provide, as they do in the Curious Village, for a vital element of the story itself; what seems like charming eccentricity at first, grows into something more as we realize that the loving care put into the puzzle's construction is fueled, not simply by an odd obsession with puzzles, but by the love of a man protecting his daughter in the only way he knows how.**

* One of the many reasons I love Planescape: Torment is because it is such a complete inversion of this convention, something I am certainly not alone in feeling.

** I actually have a little more to say on this point, but not really enough to justify not ending on that last sentence. You know, stuff like: blah blah a father's love is like artists love for blah blah blah, and also Faulkner.