PROFESSOR LAYTON AND THE UNWOUND FUTURE

(or The Lost Future depending on where you live)

INTRO

Hello and welcome to something different. Unsatisfied with doing streams on youtube, and with not many opportunities to stream to friends on Discord (plus that program is rapidly becoming a dysfunctional pile of crap), I've decided I want to take a different approach to sharing my gaming experiences with people - I'm just going to more or less ape the same style of let's play from LPArchive, because combining text, images, AND video feels pretty perfect for what I want to do. I get to show you exactly what I want, comment on it however I want... you get the deal.

I figured a decent game to start with would be:
- something I was already planning on doing anyway
- something that wouldn't be too difficult to grab screenshots/video of
- something that could reasonably follow the screenshot format instead of just being a long video recording

The third Professor Layton game fit the bill, since I'd already done the other two not too long ago. The first three games were meant to be more or less isolated stories, so hopefully the lack of context from the first two shouldn't be too much of an issue for you.

Unwound Future was first released on November 27, 2008 for the Nintendo DS, developed by Level-5 - who are known for their previous work with the Dark Cloud series and, after PL3:UF, would go on to create the Yo-kai Watch series - and has since also received a "HD" port for mobile devices. It follows Layton and Luke on their third (actually they've had many different adventures before this but we didn't know about those just yet) adventure, where they are suddenly contacted by Luke's future self, who asks them to help him bring back order to the dystopian future he comes from. It builds upon the systems and mechanics introduced in previous games, refining them even further & introducing fancy new features like Super Hints and Puzzle Battles.

We're going to be playing the original European NDS version of the game, since that's the only one supported by RetroAchievements and I'm not sure how I'd feasibly record any of this through a clunky-ass phone.

The Layton series has always been one of my favorites, mostly because there's just nothing that truly emulates this style of game out there, the puzzles can be pretty fun (if sometimes stupid as hell), and the soundtrack to each game is pretty banging.


Not much to comment on the structure of this "LP" - it should all be self-explanatory, really. I'm not going to be poring over every last detail of this game, we'd never get anywhere, so some smaller stuff like failure messages for puzzles or story recaps won't be covered at all, and as previously mentioned I've also got RetroAchievements enabled on this thing too so if I unlock any fancy achievements I'll list those too. Spoiler alert though, they're ALL just progression-based, nothing that really requires going out of our way to do anything special.

For this game specifically, we've also got a pre-existing save file loaded up that contains all of the DLC puzzles (seeing as there's no conceivable way we'll be able to get them through official means), so you'll be seeing those too as part of the post-game.

Not a lot else to say honestly. So, without further ado...


♫ Professor Layton's Theme

Hit New Game and we're prompted to enter our name in.





Don't do this at home, in other words. Or something like that.


♫ Suspicion

- MYSTERY 01 DISCOVERED! -

Our first Mystery appears! They're just a means of tracking the major story beats of the game, and have no real functionality otherwise.

Anyway, the game wastes no time in revealing its main hook: we've gotten a letter from Layton's apprentice Luke's 10-years-in-the-future self, asking for help with... something. Apparently, things have gone totally FUBAR in the London of the future, and Layton is seemingly the only one that can save the day, though I'm not sure how being really good at puzzles is going to be of help there - then again, weirder things have happened in this series... and, damn it, it wouldn't be very gentlemanly of Layton to ignore this, so naturally, this warrants further investigation. Before we do that though, FLASHBACK TIME:

I love the absolutely nonsensical technobabble this guy's spitting out. Sure, man, punch that Soolha particle or whatever, but does it actually work? We're about to find out pretty soon.

But since this is the first moment we have control over the game - albeit rather limited in such, this is just a prologue after all - let's go over what's in our trunk:



Not much available just yet, but this is where we'll be able to check our overall progress in the game, and among the icons down below, we've got:
- the Journal, which is currently unavailable since we haven't actually written anything in it
- Mysteries, as mentioned before, shows us our major plotlines & whether they've been resolved
- Puzzle Index, not available yet for hopefully obvious reasons
- Save, to... save our progress
- Three mysterious-looking icons! Looks like an RC car, a parrot, and a book of some kind... although, veterans of Curious Village and/or Diabolical Box will already know that these will be Unwound Future's three "mini-games" that will be unlocked as we progress - we'll deal with them as they come, so let's just ignore them for now.
- A Memo function where we can draw anything we want as a means of notekeeping, but it's rather limited and we won't really need it anyway.

Also, when loading a save file from this point on, you'll be greeted with a short recap of what happened just before you stopped playing; for the purposes of this LP, they are pretty redundant, and so I will not be showing these whatsoever.

Back to the overworld, we've got a few people we can eavesdrop on, many things to touch...
Examining things in the area will let us see a few comments from the gang:



To spare myself the RIDICULOUS amount of effort this would take otherwise (it's taken me 1-2 hours to edit this entire page alone and we're only FIVE MINUTES into the game), I'm not going to take screenshots of every single one of these dialog boxes, but instead will transcribe them to text, like so:

[? WINDOWS] LUKE: There are people watching the event from the windows.
[? TIME MACHINE] LAYTON: This appears to be the entrance to the machine.
[? TIME MACHINE DOODADS] LUKE: What a strange contraption. I wonder if it really works?
[? SKY] LUKE: What a lovely day! It's just perfect for an event like this.

That's all we can poke at for this screen. Let's talk to the inspector and his buddy again:



They both have more to say, so let's poke them again:



Over on the right, we've got a not as familiar couple - Bill, the PM of London, and his wife Caroline, who don't appear to be enjoying this showcase very much (this particular dialogue is voiced by the way but I didn't think it was really worth the effort just to record):



Layton and Luke are themselves pretty unsure about this whole thing:



Listening in on Bill again real quick, the two really couldn't give less of a fuck about this time machine, it seems. Typical politicians.



Alright, let's go see what's troubling that guard so much. From Diabolical Box onwards, you get two different icons when interacting with someone; the first indicates pure dialogue, regardless if it progresses the story or not:



.. and the second, as we'll see when interacting with the guard, indicates that this conversation leads to a puzzle:



Very small detail, but nice to have. Curious Village would show the exclamation point on every single interaction, no matter what. Anyway, this is what the guard has to say to us:





♫ Puzzles Reinvented

Alright! Our first puzzle! After a quick tutorial on how answering puzzles in general works, we can get ready to solving this... after a few more explanations from me.

We've got a few options to look at on the bottom-right here:

- Hints will provide us with guidance if we were to get stuck on a puzzle. HOWEVER, one of this game's achievements on RA requires that we hold 300 hint coins at once, and that's exactly as many as there are in the entire game, meaning we CANNOT spend any of our coins at all. Taking screenshots of every individual hint would be more effort than if I just wrote them down through text anyway, so this works in my favor. Just for laughs, here's what it looks like when you do buy hints:



Of note here is the SUPER HINT, which first appears in this game and was not present in the last two; at the cost of double the usual hint coins, you can get a hint that practically spells out the entire solution for you if you're well and truly stuck. They can be real lifesavers in a normal blind playthrough, but.. they do require you to cash out 5 coins total (2+3 from the other hints), and you're highly unlikely to find all 300 coins by yourself, which would still only give you enough for 60 puzzles, AND there's 168 puzzles total in the game, so... better save it for the real bastards. Or, you know, use a walkthrough.

- The Quit button, allowing you to take a break from the puzzle and tackle it later. This option isn't always available, but we're going to solve every puzzle we come across the moment we encounter it, so we'll pretty much never have to use this.

- The Memo, which has gotten an upgrade since it was added in PL2. We've got two pen sizes now, an eraser, and a total of 8 colors to play around with. Very good feature to have.



- Restart, which, obviously, resets the puzzle to its initial state.

- Submit, for when we think we've got the solution & are ready to be judged.



Right. So. This intruder. Incredibly simple puzzle, really, it's the beginning after all. The second clue we're given is, by itself, enough to solve this puzzle: only one single tablecloth doesn't share a color with any of its neighbors, and it's the red one with a red flower.



The hints say as much:

HINT 1: The clues mention the colors of the flowers and the tablecloths. Use the Memo function to mark the clues on the seating plan. It may help you visualize the situation more clearly.
HINT 2: Though one of the clues is that "his table is next to one with a red flower", it doesn't mean that the table in question doesn't have a red flower as well.
HINT 3: Pay attention to the tablecloths. If you find some tables that are a different color from their neighbors...
SUPER: Look for a table with a red flower and a red tablecloth. There's only one table that fits the bill.

A keen eye may have noticed that these are not quite the same hints that are actually given in my European version of the game. This is because I was incredibly lazy and looked up a walkthrough which had the US version of these hints. They're really not that different for this one, honestly, it's just various inexplicable differences in sentence structure. But this is also a good time as any to mention that major regional differences DO exist for this game, and the two that came before; dialogue tends to have very slight differences, but most importantly, entire puzzles tend to be different between US/EU versions of the game. So if you're American and have prior experience with this game, expect to encounter some surprise puzzles you've never even seen...

Anyway, we input our answer, and:



- PUZZLE 001 SOLVED! -

- 10/6000 PICARATS -- 1/168 PUZZLES -

We get a whole 10 picarats for our trouble and a tutorial on what they're for:



Don't you worry, game, what we seek here is nothing less than perfection.

Also, we've now unlocked the Puzzle Index, having solved one now:



The Index is where we can revisit & replay past puzzles without risk of losing picarats, and also where we can unlock every hint for free, which I'm going to be taking advantage from now on for the purposes of this LP. Solving a puzzle correctly on the first try without using any hints also gets us a cool golden Layton icon at the top. Or at least I'm pretty sure that's how it works. We won't ever really find out.





Mister scientist dude is ready to do his thing now, so... let's see what happens!

- MYSTERY 02 DISCOVERED! -

--- END OF... INTRO. CONTINUE TO... PROLOGUE ---