Professor Layton is back and in a big way. Level-5 brought a build of the latest entry in the series, Professor Layton and the New World of Steam to Tokyo Game Show 2024. We had a chance to sit down and play the demo on the Nintendo Switch at the show and are here to tell you all about it. Let’s get into it.
Booth & Demo
New World of Steam takes place in the fictional Steam Bison, America a year after the events in Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. Per Level-5, “there, the power of highly advanced steam engines has ushered in a new world, greatly surpassing even London’s technological development. Due to a mysterious incident in Steam Bison, a new adventure for Professor Layton and Luke begins.”
The Layton area of Level-5’s booth was the first thing that I saw when I entered the TGS show floor. Behind the logo for the game is a backdrop for Steam Bison. The tables for the demo units carry on the same aesthetic, making for a pretty cool scene. I’m not exactly sure how many demo units were available in the booth, but there were still pretty long wait times for the game throughout the show. Each play session offered ten minutes of play time with a counter ticking down in the upper right hand corner of the screen. The demo was available completely in Japanese or with English text and Japanese voices.
Gameplay
Per usual, gameplay in The New World of Steam is in the style of a point and click adventure. You join Layton and Luke as they wander the streets looking for the workshop of the town’s top inventor, Eggmuffin. When you first gain control, you be tasked to ask the townsfolk about Eggmuffin’s whereabouts. You take control of a cursor to investigate the current screen further and can use the D-pad (or use the cursor to click some on screen arrows) to move to other locations. The cursor was a little bit slow, but that wasn’t a big deal to me.
Not too far into the demo, I was presented with my first puzzle. A man just simply can’t focus on his work, so Layton and Luke take it upon themselves to help rewire a circuit board. “Restore the Circuit Board” tasks players with the following:
- Connect three points at a right angle to form an L-shape.
- Wires cannot skip over connection points.
- Each wire must intersect with (at least) one other wire.
Being on a very tight time limit, I initial skimmed through the directions and couldn’t get it figured out. After checking the instructions a little more closely and also making use of a Hint Coin, I was able to get the puzzle figured out. I’m generally not very quick at figuring out puzzles, and I honestly should have used the Hint Coin earlier to try to get deeper into the demo. At any rate, once this was cleared, you are able to get further into the city and discover a little more about how to find Eggmuffin’s workshop.
One other highlight from the game included an encounter with a ghost gunman. When this happens, Luke is scared silly, while Layton looks like he wants to go go toe-to-toe with the specter. It’s ridiculous, but was pretty funny.
Visuals & Performance
Layton and Luke have never looked better. The cel-shaded models look sharp and the town itself is full of numerous details - steam puffing out of buildings, interactive NPCs, vehicles moving around on the streets and more. Level-5 has crafted a stunning looking city here. While the game does look and run great most of the time, one of the cutscenes, the one with the ghost, was just a little bit choppy. Aside from that, things were great.
Additional Information
As for other information on the game, Level-5 has confirmed that Yo Oizumi will reprise his role as Hershel Layton, while Luke will be voiced by actress and model, Mio Imada. As I mentioned earlier, the demo at TGS only featured the Japanese voices. We’ll just have to wait for more information about that in the meantime.
Conclusion
While my time with Layton was short, I liked what I saw. The puzzle was a little bit hectic on such a strict time limit, but interesting. I like the look of the world and characters and this appears to be shaping up as something to keep an eye on, especially for hardcore fans of the series. Professor Layton and the New World of Steam is scheduled for release on the Switch in 2025.
But let’s turn things over to you. What do you think of this snippet of gameplay from the show? Are you planning on picking this one up when it comes out? What was the first Layton game you played? For me, it was Miracle Mask on the 3DS when it released during the launch in Japan. I wrote up a set of impressions for Nintendo World Report at the time and enjoyed it. Needless to say, that was an challenging lesson in Japanese. Sound off in the comments down below. We’d love to hear from you!
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