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Professor Layton, renowned archaeologist and master of logic, along with his able, young, assistant Luke, is summoned to the village of St. Mystere by Lady Dahlia. We know that her husband, Baron Reinhold, has recently passed away and that his fabled wealth is to be left in its entirety to the person that can solve the mystery of the Golden Apple.

You may think you're just in St. Mystere about the Golden Apple. It's definitely the central mystery of the story, but it's far from the only mystery you'll face. The puzzles to ponder just keep accumulating — just waiting for you to find the solution.

The overall story of the Golden Apple is truly magnificent. I have to say that this is by far, the best game I've played on the DS. The cut-scenes are like watching excerpts from a Miyazaki movie. The music is perfect. The voice acting is delightful.

In case you have any doubt at this point, I highly recommend this gaming experience, but enough rhapsodizing on my part. What, exactly, you might wonder, is this marvel of gaming ingenuity?

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is all about puzzles. Logic, intuition, analysis — these are all the tools you need to navigate the insular yet surprisingly deep, world of St. Mystere.

As you will quickly learn, the puzzles begin immediately. Your first task is to determine how to get to the village in the first place. Welcome to Puzzle No. 001 "Where's the Town?"

St. Mystere is positively stuffed to the gills with puzzles. There are the obvious puzzles you'll get from talking to the villagers or facing obstacles, but there are also a number of hidden puzzles that you'll only find by tapping just the right spot on the screen with your stylus.

Solving each puzzle can potentially earn you between 10 and 99 picarats. The more picarats you can earn, the harder the puzzle is going to be. Beyond that, the picarats aren't really currency as you won't be buying anything, but by the end of the game you'll need a certain number of picarats to unlock some of the bonus content. By the time you have faced every possible puzzle (without using the wi-fi feature) you will have met (and hopefully conquered) 135 puzzles.

I really enjoy how the game is organized. Once you've gotten to town and begun the game in earnest, you'll get the little walking icon (a pair of shoes) and Professor Layton's trunk. You'll move around the map by tapping the shoes and then tapping the screen in the direction you want to go. The lower screen shows a nice view of where you are in the game while the upper screen is usually a map of the town.

Along with the ability to save the game (and you have three save game slots), all of the tidbits of information you need will be accessed through the Professor's trunk. You'll have the Professor's journal, the list of mysteries, the Gizmo screen, the Painting screen, the Inn screen and the Puzzle Index.

His journal keeps track of important pieces of information you've discovered along the way. There are a total of 10 mysteries to solve — including that of the Golden Apple. You'll find those mysteries, along with their status, listed here. As you find stray parts of items around town, they'll appear in the Gizmo area of the trunk. Once you've assembled the parts you have a useful little item. You'll also be collecting scraps of a painting. The painting area of the trunk is where you twist and turn the pieces to rebuild the painting.

After you've checked into the inn in town, the Inn area of the chest is active. You'll sometimes earn furniture and decorative items from solving puzzles. You get to decide whether each item goes to Luke's room or the Professor's room. You need to optimize the room for each to unlock some of that yummy bonus content. I will tell you that while each room can potentially hold 20 items, between the two of them, 10 slots are not used.

Having the puzzle index so easily accessibly is particularly useful. This keeps track of all the puzzles I've encountered in the game. The puzzles are organized in numeric order and show the title, type of each puzzle and where I found it. I can see whether or not I solved the puzzle and whether I used any of the three available hints. I'll see the total picarats that were available for the puzzle, as well as how many picarats I actually earned. There are some puzzles that take multiple moves to solve and can be solved in some minimum number of moves. If you're a perfectionist, you can easily revisit the puzzle and try to solve it again until you're happy with your results.

Just a note on the potential vs. earned picarats — if you get the puzzle right on the first try, you get full credit. There's a small deduction for missing the second guess. After missing the third guess, there are no further deductions, so you're not going to drop to zero for any of the games, no matter how much they stump you.

I mentioned that you can get up to three hints with each puzzle — well these hints aren't free. Hidden around town are a number of little golden hint coins. Each hint you buy costs you one hint coin. You definitely want to save those coins for the harder (higher picarat) puzzles. You'll want to tap absolutely everything you can see on the screen. You might get a coin. You might get a hidden puzzle. You might get some idle commentary from Luke or the Professor, or you might get nothing. There's no penalty for tapping around, so go for it.

I did use a certain number of hint coins getting through the game, but even so I ended the game with 50 hint coins still available in my inventory. I had a solid 5070 picarats to my credit and had invested just over 17 hours of my time (which I am happy to have invested, by the way).

Because I don't want to spoil any of the story content of the game, I'm going to move on and talk about the Bonus content. The bonus content is almost entirely controlled by what you've done in the game, so you'll need to load one of your saved games before you enter the bonus area.

For those of you that have set up your DS for wi-fi, there are addition weekly puzzles you can access. I don't have my DS set up for this, so I really can't tell you anything about these puzzles.

You have access to your puzzle index in the bonus area. As far as I can tell, it works exactly the same as it does when accessed through Professor Layton's trunk.

Layton's Challenge is a series of additional puzzles you can unlock if you meet the appropriate conditions. Some of these puzzles were quite hard and not at all for the faint of heart. The game was also pretty harsh about hints in this area. On one particular puzzle I asked for a hint and it told me to figure it out myself. I tried the second hint and it told me to stop wasting coins — that it really wasn't going to help.

The Top Secret area was quite enjoyable. There aren't puzzles in here, but there is some lovely content to savor. There are 40 profiles of the characters in the game — from Professor Layton and Luke to the various denizens of St. Mystere. There are 20 pieces of artwork from the game. There are 19 musical clips. There were a bunch (I didn't count them) of voice clips of Luke and Professor Layton saying various things from the game. What I especially appreciated was the inclusion of the 16 cut-scene movies from the game. They are so well done — it's a real treat to get to see them again.

Finally, there's an area called The Hidden Door. Apparently if you buy the sequel to Professor Layton and the Curious Village (yes, there will be a sequel!!), you get a code that you can enter in this game. Since the sequel is not in American release yet, I haven't had the chance to open The Hidden Door.

Do you like puzzles? Do you like great stories with many intertwined mysteries? How about lovely graphics and delightful music? If so, you really need to rush out and get Professor Layton and the Curious Village. This is an awesome game, and if we had one of those five star rating systems — I would give it a six.