Professor Layton and the Spectre's Call is the fourth game in the series (also known as Professor Layton and the Last Specter outside of Europe), exclusively for the Nintendo DS. It is set as a prequel where Layton first meets Luke and is the first in the prequel trilogy. In this game, Professor Layton travels to the town of Misthallery, where a giant shadow spectre is turning up in the night to wreck havoc to the houses. Destroying buildings and bridges alike, it is truly a supernatural mystery. In this town, Layton meets Luke, who can somehow predict when the spectre will next appear. The team is rounded out by Layton's new assistant, Emmy, who is able to beat the most beefy of men in physical combat as well as being intellectually gifted.
The team travels around the town, as well as sections of London to solve the mystery, where they will encounter various characters, both new and old (mostly new), including some who are evil. The characters each have their own quirks, whether these are visual or their personality. The population has a thing for puzzles and will randomly give you puzzles for no reason (however, sometimes they're integrated and relevant to the scenario which is a bonus when this happens). The story is told via text dialogue from NPCs and the occasional animated cutscene. The animation is better than ever before and the game generally has higher quality artwork. Be warned though that the story is slow going until you hit the last third of the game in which it ramps up the pacing and is really nice. While the revelation of the spectre can seem a bit underwhelming, the ending was fantastic and emotional.
The voice acting is superb and coupled with the new music that plays in the finale, it really nails the atmosphere. This is one of the best stories within the series with a neat twist in the finale to simulate a final boss battle. The series has always mixed story with puzzles and point and click adventure mechanics. When exploring the world, you will be using the touchscreen to travel around the town, investigating sections by tapping on objects. There are collectables hidden within the environment and they are hard to find unless you tap on everything. Travelling between screens can be tedious, especially when you need to travel to a faraway place. To help alleviate some of this, there is a limited quick travel system by the way of a boat where you can get on and off at certain stops. This is actually crucial since the map is really big now and certainly unwieldy at times.
There are 170+ puzzles within the game, with 155 that you can access via the story. The rest are unlocked when you finish the game and are some of the hardest puzzles it has to offer. There are a variety of puzzles and a lot of them require you to think outside the box. You'll get word puzzles, logic puzzles, arranging items into a pattern and shifting blocks around. Some can feel cheap because it's all down to the wording but if you are stuck, you can use a Hint Coin (which is found in the environment) to unlock up to four hints in each puzzle. However, there are limited Hint Coins available in the game so you need to use them sparingly. In additional, there are three minigames: Toy Train, Fish and Puppet Show. The train minigame allows you to set the path of the train to go via all the stations but have obstacles and limited fuel. The Fish minigame allows you to set bubbles for the fish to bounce off in order to collect all coins. The Puppet Show minigame just makes you choose specific actions to match the scene.
Furthermore, if you have the US version ("The Last Specter"), then there is a RPG Professor Layon's London Life. Unfortunately, the European version dummies this out and is not accessible at all. If you follow a walkthrough and don't care to solve the puzzles yourself, being only interested in the story, then you can breeze through within 7 hours (same as previous games). However, play is properly and you will take anywhere from 10-25 hours depending on your skill and how much exploration/backtracking you do. Overall, Professor Layton and the Spectre's Call presents more of the same great mix of puzzle gameplay ad story. The plot is intriguing at first and culminates into a grand finale. This game is definitely worthwhile for fans of the series and is actually also a decent place to start being the beginning of a new trilogy.
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