Puzzle-Solving Professor’s Prequel Holds Up After 17 Years

Key facts

• Title: Professor Layton and the Last Specter (Europe: Professor Layton and the Spectre’s Call)
• Developer/publisher: LEVEL-5; published by LEVEL-5 and Nintendo
• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Release: 2009 in Japan; North America and PAL regions in 2011
• Puzzles: over 170
• Score: 8.4/10 (IGDB critic aggregate, 6 outlets)

Professor Layton and the Last Specter is the fourth game in the Professor Layton series, and it is the one that goes backward. LEVEL-5 built it as a prequel, set three years before the first trilogy, and used it to answer a question the earlier games never bothered with: how Professor Hershel Layton met Luke Triton. The answer arrives in a watery English village called Misthallery, with a monster in the mist and a boy who has been predicting where it will strike next.

Trailer, via LEVEL5ch【公式】.

Misthallery and the Specter’s Flute

The setup is the series at its most confident. Misthallery’s citizens have long told of a specter that rose from the mist to defend the village whenever the Specter’s Flute was played. Lately a monster the townspeople take for that specter has been tearing through the village at night, destroying homes and buildings. Layton is drawn there by a letter supposedly sent by his close friend Clark Triton, the mayor. It wasn’t. Luke wrote it, having learned to predict the attacks, and he wanted Layton’s help ending them.

That inversion — the apprentice recruiting the professor — is the smartest thing in the script. Luke sneaks out of his house to join the investigation, and the game treats his competence as a given rather than a novelty.

Emmy Altava and the Black Raven

Last Specter also introduces Emmy Altava, hired as Layton’s assistant at Gressenheller University, and she is not decoration. The player moves all three protagonists through Misthallery: Layton, Emmy and Luke. The town runs on gondolas along its canals, and it splits into five regions — the Crossroads, the Market, the East District, Ely Street and Highyard Hill. The Crossroads holds the library and Clark Triton’s home. The Market is a shady place run by a mysterious entity called the Black Raven. The East District has an abandoned warehouse. Ely Street and Highyard Hill are mostly residential.

On the outskirts of Highyard Hill sits the manor owned by the former mayor’s children, who live apart from the village. The townspeople believe a witch lives there. The town is also rumored to hold the Golden Garden, hidden ruins of an ancient city.

The middle act sends the three hunting the black market for word on the flute. After winning the trust of the Black Raven — a group of children who run the market — Layton learns the flute was auctioned to Evan Barde, once the richest man in Misthallery, shortly before the attacks began. Barde is dead. His daughter Arianna, once close friends with Luke, now suffers a terminal illness and is the girl the town calls a witch. She refuses to speak to anyone.

Tapping the Bottom Screen

The puzzles are the engine, and there are over 170 of them. The game presents itself as an adventure: tap a shoe-shaped icon in the bottom-right corner of the touch screen, then tap the arrow for the path you want. Tap anywhere on the bottom screen to investigate objects and pull up dialogue, hint coins, collectible items or hidden puzzles. Tap a visible non-player character to start a conversation. Sections of Misthallery stay locked until the plot advances far enough to open them.

This is a point-and-click game wearing a mystery’s coat, and it works because the town is worth poking at. Hint coins reward the habit of touching everything. The gating is the weak spot — the story decides when you may walk somewhere, not your curiosity.

London Life, and the Version Europe Didn’t Get

The strangest and most interesting fact about Last Specter is what shipped inside it. The game includes a full additional role-playing game, Professor Layton’s London Life, available from the start. Players interact with characters from across the series in a town called Little London. It was advertised as having over 100 hours of content.

European copies didn’t get it. London Life was cut from those versions because translating its text would have significantly delayed the game’s release. That is the trade the publisher made, and it is hard to defend. A bonus of that size is the reason a certain kind of player buys the cartridge at all, and European buyers paid for a smaller game than buyers elsewhere did.

What Last Specter Gets Right

Ranked by what actually holds up:

1. Luke as the one who called for help, which makes the partnership feel earned rather than assigned.
2. Emmy Altava, a third playable presence who keeps the investigation from being two men trading exposition.
3. Misthallery’s canal layout, which gives the tap-to-investigate loop a place worth learning.
4. The 170-plus puzzle count, which is generous even by this series’ standards.
5. London Life, on the copies that have it.

The game released in Japan during 2009 and was the highest-selling game there the week it launched. North America and PAL regions waited until 2011.

The prequel problem is real, though. Anyone arriving from the first trilogy knows how the Layton-Luke relationship ends up, so the tension here is about method, not outcome. Last Specter answers that well enough. The mystery of the specter, the flute and the girl in the manor carries the middle stretch, and the town’s legends give the puzzles a reason to exist beyond the puzzles.

What matters most is the correction it makes to the series’ own history. Luke was never a sidekick who appeared fully formed. He was a kid who figured out a monster’s schedule and wrote a letter to the one man he thought could stop it. That is a better origin than the series had any right to expect, and it is the reason Last Specter sits near the top of the Layton run rather than in the middle of it.

game review · Level-5 · London Life · Nintendo DS · Professor Layton · puzzle games