In early 2008, the Western World was introduced to Professor Layton and his inquisitive ways. The game, which had already two successful titles in Japan, took the Brain Teasers so many children and adults grew up with and combined it with an incredible mystery. Now in 2009, the second game in the series, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box has hit stores and it still manages to bring everything that made the first game such a cult hit and continues to prove that games can be both fun and educational.

For those unfamiliar with the series, you play as Professor Hershel Layton and his trusty apprentice Luke who love to solve unexplained mysteries. In this title, the two receive a letter from an old colleague of Layton who claims to have found the illusive Elysian Box, a mysterious box which is told to kill all those who open it. The pair arrives at the colleague’s apartment only to find him lying dead on the floor and the box missing. Now it’s up to two of them to find out what exactly has happened and hopefully retrieve the box before it can do more harm.

What makes the Layton series so fantastic is how it blends a point and click adventure game with Brain Teasers. In order to progress through the game, you will have to communicate with people and interact with various objects. As such, the interactions you have typically involve solving a puzzle. In one situation, you might have to reattach the Positive and Negative to get an object working or using your deductive logic to determine a specific location of where you need to go next.

The puzzles vary from extremely simple to down-right challenging. For those who remember playing Brain Teasers in elementary school, some of the puzzles will be right at home. If you never had the opportunity to experience them, you will be giving your brain quite the workout.

For the few people who played through the pair’s first adventure, you will feel right at home with this. Very little has changed in terms of how the game plays out. You will travel to various locations, talk to numerous people and try to uncover a slew of different mini-mysteries en-route to uncovering the greater challenge.

On the puzzle end of things, although there are tons of new puzzles, there are a lot of variations from those seen in the last game. They have been masked to some degree, but those intuitive minds will pick up on them right away. If there were some puzzles you despised, be sure that they will still be some of those same ones ready to anger you again.

On the story side of the game, The Diabolical Box is just as enthralling as The Curious Village was. The cast of characters are extremely interesting; from the most minor of character to those you interact with on numerous occasions, there is a lot to like here. The only downside to some of the characters, especially with two early on, is that if you haven’t played the first game, you might not understand the actions of Layton or Luke. It’s not really a bad thing, but the game does assume you have some understanding of the series going into this one.

The Diabolical Box works at trying to make itself challenging without trying to be difficult to the point of refusing to continue. This is the case for most of the puzzles but there are certainly a good chunk of them that will cause trouble for any person regardless of age. As in the first game, you can find hint coins which can be used to help in solving tough puzzles, but they are not always that helpful. It will often require you using all three of your hints just to get a good enough of a push to help complete a puzzle. What will hurt your forehead the most is that once you see the answer, you will smack yourself when you see how simple the response actually was.

Again, everything that made the first game such a thrill to play, including its fantastic visuals, continues to impress here. There is a lot of variety in the characters you interact with and the environments you visit. You will spend some time in London, on a train and in two little villages; each location looks absolutely fantastic. As this is a point and click adventure, there is very little movement actually occurring in each scene, but it’s the amount of detail placed in each section that really stands out.

For a DS title, the group at Level-5 were not afraid to mix in plenty of cut-scenes throughout the game. These are some of the best around and a real treat to watch. The number of cut-scenes has nearly doubled since the first game and these are not short 5-10 second clips, but a few reaching close to a full-minute in length.

As well as the great work done on the visuals, the soundtrack is also up there. From the voice-acting to the classic Western-European score, it all adds to the atmosphere of the title. The game is not fully voiced acted but there is still a lot of it throughout the story. The game’s score is also quite relaxing which can be really helpful when you need to act calm during a certain puzzle. There is some repetition in the game’s score, but that is more a result of spending prolonged periods of times in one area over others.

The core story should take the average person about 10-12 hours to complete, but that is only the main entrée in this adventure. As in the first game, there are plenty of things to unlock as you play the game. On top of the main story, you will have to assist a hamster in losing weight, reassemble a Camera and create a slew of different tea recipes and serve them to various people.

On top of those mini-games, the Picarats that you earn for completing puzzles also unlocks more bonus content. The game’s main story contains 138 puzzles to solve, but most will only go through about 105 of them during their play-through. In all, there are more than 153 puzzles available in game and there are weekly puzzles that can be unlocked via download. So even when you think you’ve completed the game and solved all the mysteries, there is still a lot more to do.

If there was ever an example needed to prove the point that games can not only be entertaining but educational at the same time, the Professor Layton series is without a doubt the best choice to show. There is certainly something for everyone with a fantastic story, plenty of mystery and enough to really stimulate the brain. With a third game already available in Japan, a fourth in production and a film hitting cinemas in December, here’s hoping that the series continues on this side of the Pacific.