Even the simpler puzzles will leave you quite satisfied upon completion, as the game’s charming setting and delightful music make for an ideally relaxing environment to cozy up with a good puzzle. You’ll find a plethora of clever brainteasers, all supplemented by a series of helpful hints for those who don’t mind spending their hard-earned Hint Coins. Befitting the king of puzzles (or the “professor” of puzzles, I suppose), the puzzle design in Miracle Mask is top notch. The forgiving difficulty progression should successfully ease novice puzzlers into the swing of things, but there are plenty of head-scratchers further down the line for those looking for more of a challenge. You’ll find plenty of variety too, with well over 100 puzzles to solve over the course of the adventure, ranging from guiding a lost ladybug to sliding penguins around ice cubes to unraveling riddles and working your way through tricky logic puzzles. The puzzles themselves also benefit from this slick, new art design, with top-screen visuals - often presented in stereoscopic 3D - effectively illustrating the conundrum at hand. Overall the new style is a win, and while the 3D models sometimes don’t seem to fit in as well with the lovely 2D cutscenes peppered throughout the narrative, small improvements (like getting to watch the characters interact before your eyes or Layton triumphantly swinging his pointer finger toward the screen after solving a puzzle) offer more than a fair trade-off for this slight downgrade. This new approach lends even more personality to Layton’s world (who knew that was even possible?) and does a bang-up job of bringing these colorful characters to life.

3D character models now supplement the gorgeous, hand-painted backgrounds, and buoyant animations help move along the text-box dialogue.

By far the game’s most noticeable upgrade comes via the franchise’s first foray into three-dimensional graphics.

Miracle box tv review