Professor Layton: Every puzzle has an answer (even puzzles that are smelly)

A smelly man at Target sold me Professor Layton and the Curious Village about a week ago. He smelled really bad, like emergency bad, and I've had a moral crisis over the past week wondering if I should have alerted his fellow employees, or his supervisors, or the local health board—anyone in a position to break the news to him gently, to shuffle him off to a shower or, at the very least, a bathroom. It's humiliating to buy video games at Target in the first place, since you have to ask permission to have opened their cabinet of valuable shrinkage-prone products—you have to take on the role of penitent thief—but it's doubly humiliating to point through the glass at what a pungent man in a red shirt calls "oh, you want Curious Valley," then slink behind him to the register at what should have been a safe, odor-free distance, but which wasn't, god help us all. His sticky stink haunted the first few days of my ownership of this game. Just looking at the cover would call forth the scent, and for hours it would flit here and there in my nose, emerging phantom-like from the combination of commonplace aromatic molecules of the household or city. After a few days (mercifully), the pong exorcised itself from my nose and my memory, but I will forever associate Professor Layton with those brief, panicked moments of conviction: that I had been irrevocably tainted.

As for the game itself: it's awesome. I finished it yesterday. And by "finished" I mean finished: 135/135 puzzles, 5000+ picarats (not sure if this is enough to unlock all the bonus content?), maybe I missed a few hint coins somewhere, and the portion of the game available only to owners of the sequel is still, of course, virgin territory, but I think I did a thorough job of putting this baby to bed. I don't think I've ever devoured a DS game with such intensity, not even Phantom Hourglass.

( more review after the cut )