Parent's Guide: Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy is a brain teasing puzzle game on the 3DS. Mixing a point and click adventure with the most head scratching riddles you've ever seen, the game follows the tale of Professor Layton, his assistant Emmy and apprentice Luke as they set off on a globe trotting adventure to uncover the secrets of a mysterious ancient race, known as the Azran.

What follows is a rollercoaster ride of a story, told at a relaxed pace and punctuated with more puzzles than you could shake a professor's top hat at. Splitting your time between moving from point-and-click style scene to scene, talking to residents, searching for hint coins, and hunting down the hidden puzzles as you go, and solving the aforementioned brainteasers, this is a game that's bound to get your child thinking - but that may be too tricky for the younger ones.

With a heck of a lot of reading involved, much of which involves long words, or complex analysis as you look for the clues and red herrings written in each puzzle's description, this certainly isn't a game that young children could take on lightly. While puzzles range from mazes, to riddles (of the "I have 3 more than A, but five less than C, how many do I have" variety), and from slide puzzles to logic brainteasers, Layton is a game aimed at those who want to move up from Brain Training style puzzles to something that'll tax there brain in a different way, with challenges that'll keep many an adult up at night. There's certainl a lot that will really push a child's mind here - and while you can use hint coins in the puzzles, to unlock a series of progressively more helpful hints, we'd still recommend this one for older children only. Sample sentences include "After studying one of the artefacts, however, Clark and I came to a startling conclusion: the recovered items were fake!" and "N-now, before I c-crystalise into a bouffant stalagtite, I bid you adieau"

As a game that mostly revolves around solving puzzles, there's very little for parents to be concerned about here. There's no swearing or sex to speak of, and no violence that should be of concern.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Nintendo 3DS