May's Mystery: Forbidden Memories - Review

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The puzzle / adventure genre has certainly found itself a comfortable home on the Nintendo DS. Between the touch screen, microphone, dual screens and traditional buttons it’s no wonder that so many puzzle series have been born and flourished on Nintendo’s little system that could. Well dust off that thinking cap and study up on that logic and math because May's Mystery: Forbidden Memories has arrived for the double screened head scratcher. Does this latest brain teasing adventure stand on its own or is it forever in the shadow of a very tall top hat?

The game opens with May (who bears a striking resemblance to Olive Oil from the Popeye cartoons), her little brother and their pilot taking a trip in a hot air balloon. Soon they are caught in a storm and the balloon crashes. When May awakens, both the pilot and her brother are missing; all that is left behind is a letter explaining how her brother went to the nearby village of Dragonville to look for help.

Now if you are at all familiar with the Professor Layton (and the puzzle games you’ve played before) games, then you will not only know what to expect from May’s Mystery but also probably have a very serious case of déja vu because the game copies the good professor in almost every way. Not that that’s a bad thing. May’s game features the same kind of puzzle and adventure elements that Layton made his name on. The problem here is that, on a whole, the game isn’t nearly as well rounded or fine tuned as Professor Layton (and the games he stars in).

For starters, just simply navigating around town is made much more of a hassle by the fact that you cant just tap where you want to go, you have to press the compass, which makes arrows appear on the screen that point to where you can go. Not a major problem but an annoyance none the less. I should also note that unlike a certain top hat wearing professor (who shall remain nameless) you can’t explore your surroundings, in every screen you can only go where the arrows say you can meaning no exploration or secrets here. Also, every time you fail a puzzle you have to go through ALL the dialogue for that puzzle again. Now this can, and will, get very tiresome very fast, especially since the hint system for this game is largely useless. Not only are the hints as convoluted as the puzzles themselves but the game doesn’t even tell you why you were right/wrong when you complete a puzzle, which takes a lot of the ‘learning’ out of the experience.

Just like the Layton games (and yes I will be saying that a lot during this review) you go through the village, speaking to townsfolk, asking them for clues to help solve the mystery. However they will only help you if you solve a puzzle for them, whether it is organizing matches in a specific way or figuring out how to place differently shaped objects into one larger object. Unique to May’s Mystery however are all new rhythm puzzles, in these games you have to match the song being played by tapping in rhythm with the stylus. These rhythm games provide some of the best moments in May’s Mystery; it’s just a shame that out of the game’s hundreds of puzzles just over a dozen are actually these rhythm games.

The game’s presentation also mimics Professor Layton (and copied the art style) in almost every way. From the European inspired setting, to the hand-drawn visuals and even the soundtrack, everything here is very Layton-esque. And again, it’s not a bad thing for this game to borrow from the best around, because the some parts of May’s Mystery are exceptionally well done. The voice acting during the cut-scenes and the soundtrack are particular stand-outs also the drawing of the main characters like May and her brother are well done. But like the gameplay the presentation here just doesn’t feel as sharp as what you will find in… that other puzzle game series on the DS. For example, the secondary characters are often horribly drawn, looking like random ideas thrown together to make a person. Also the game features a numerous amount of typos which as my editors would say, is a major pain in the (edited for language).

On a technical note, the game both impresses and depresses at the same time. For one the cutscenes are surprisingly well made, in many cases standing toe to toe with what we’ve seen in the Professor Layton games. On the other hand the game features surprisingly long and frequent load times, which baffles the mind seeing as how it is on a Nintendo DS cartridge. Now I may not be the most tech-savvy person in the room but shouldn’t it be near-impossible for a DS cart to have need for so many load times, especially of you’re only going to be loading puzzles, text and static images?

May’s Mystery features over 270 puzzles which is definitely a solid number for the puzzle aficionado. But what it gains it quantity it loses in quality as the vast majority of the brain teasers are simply re-hashes of things we already solved in any of the four Professor Layton games that came before. The game does have some secret puzzles to find and unlock that will truly test your skills at math, logic and more. Speaking of difficulty, it’s easy to see that May’s Mystery is aimed at a younger audience, and the puzzles are definitely a tad easier than the one’s found in Professor Layton (and the impossible puzzles) but sometimes the difficulty spikes randomly between levels to near un-solvable levels. 

Over the course of this review I have made numerous comparisons (and lame puns) between May’s Mystery: Forbidden Memories and the Professor Layton (and the nearly identical games) titles. Both these games share nearly everything in common and May’s game does have a lot of positives going for it, but it just seems to do it all a bit more… sloppily. The puzzles aren’t up to par, the navigation is cumbersome, the presentation is a mixed bag and the difficulty is all over the place, all things that Mr. Layton has long since ironed out of his games. So maybe May’s Mystery isn’t the game to unseat the puzzle master from his throne of mind benders, but it puts up a valiant effort none the less. 

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