Professor Layton and Pandora's Box is the second game in the series, also known as Diabolical Box in the US. Once again, released exclusively for the Nintendo DS, it combines an engaging mystery story with puzzle solving gameplay. Continuing soon after Curious Village, Layton and his sidekick, Luke, find one of their mentor killed by the mysterious Pandora Box and embark on a train to solve the mystery surrounding it. The story told in this game is intriguing, and the pacing is faster and flows better than the original. Layton and Luke will meet familiar faces, most of which are predictable. Throughout their travels, they will dig up further mysteries but thankfully, it doesn't keep building up for the whole game before revealing the answers. Instead, it slowly rewards you with the mysteries' answers, which works much better. The plot stalls in the middle of the game when it feels like you haven't made much progress and all you're doing is being bounced back by the characters. The ending was disappointing and felt anti-climactic. After the deaths and rumors of vampires etc, the actual reason of why these phenomenon were occurring felt tame and nowhere near as extravagant as it could have been.
The story is told via animated cutscenes, and also character dialogue in which there is a piece of artwork serving as the background. In a way, Pandora's Box is a visual novel. The animation appears pixilated even on such a small screen which is disappointing. Not all dialogue is voice acted, but when it is, the voice actors did a good job. You advance the story through solving puzzles and also going to various areas to talk to characters and investigating objects. Unlike the first game, Pandora's Box now have various different areas to explore so you don't have to backtrack as much. There is the train, the town of Dropstone, and the town of Folsense. However, you do spend effectively half the game in Folsense where you have to trek all over the town, backtracking and speaking to the same characters again and again. Still, it does not feel as mundane or repetitive as Curious Village did. Of course, your enjoyment of this game is heavily reliant upon the quality of the puzzles and at the beginning, the puzzles in Pandora's box is varied enough to be interesting. Play until the end though and you will find that the types of puzzles are being repeated heavily in a short amount of time.
There are various types of puzzles including logic and deduction puzzles, spot the difference, visual pattern puzzles, word puzzles, and moving oddly shaped objects in order to move another object from the top of the screen to the bottom. Some of these puzzles are hard, frustrating and abstract. A lot of them have some kind of word play, where very specific wording will give you the clue in how to solve the puzzle. Of course, there were more than once where this type of word play was lame and cheap but the game does teach you how to approach puzzles from a different angle. There is an overabundance of certain types of puzzles, such as mazes that require you to trace and find the shortest route from one end to another, and determining which knots will get caught when pulling on a bunch of tangled ropes. It's very easy to miss puzzles during the story but thankfully the game collects missed puzzles into one area, although you will miss the character dialogue if you go down this route. Once again, you play through the entire game using only your stylus and the touchscreen. What continues to impress is the fact that all the puzzles only require one of the DS's screen for instructions.
There is a new memo pad which allows you to scrawl anything but the resolution of the DS's screen makes it difficult sometimes. This small resolution also makes it hard for the spot the difference puzzles at times. There are a few minigames such as a Hamster minigame in which you strategically place objects in order to make the hamster walk as far as possible. Then you can collect camera parts to unlock spot the difference puzzles and finally, you collect tea ingredients to brew tea and give to NPCs. Completing this minigames fully will unlock harder puzzles from the main menu. Pandora's Box boasts over 150 puzzles, of which the story will contain 138. The remaining 15 puzzles are super hard challenge puzzles which you must unlock first. Overall, Professor Layton and Pandora's Box is a good puzzle solving game. How good you are with puzzles will determine how long it'll take for you to complete the game, although some puzzles will bound to give you some pause. This is a fantastic follow up to the first game with a good story and strong puzzles.
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