There is a Professor Layton online game of “real world” puzzles called Layton’s Mystery Journey: Real World Puzzle Solving or Layton World for short that launched to help promote Layton’s Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires’ Conspiracy.
If you are just starting out with the puzzles I suggest you go here for an archive of all the puzzles that we’ve been solving through out the real puzzle game. But even though I’ve been archiving every single puzzle that still doesn’t show the full experience of solving the puzzle.
See, part of the puzzle was actually finding where in the world the puzzle actually was. Some of them were quite easy as all you had to do was follow a link to a youtube page or they included a screenname for you to follow on twitter and wait. Others had you calling a phone number and whatnot.
The most interesting ones were when you actually had a puzzle in a country but they didn’t tell you which country or city it would be in. Depending on the puzzle they would leave vague hints such as longitude and latitude coordinates, a cultural reference, time zone or a picture of the location without any context of where in the world it could be.
This is where the community was able to show their team work and ingenuity as they would use google maps among other tools to find the exact location. The amount of work done to find these things really was outstanding and it’s crazy to see the detective skills of some people. Hunting for the location was part of the puzzle that you can’t really see in the individual puzzles.
Usually a picture would suffice since it included the puzzle. But that wasn’t the case for every single puzzle, some of the actually had the people who went there solve another smaller more physical puzzle to get to the real one. For example walking around to find all the pieces of the puzzle and only then would you be able to solve it. In this case only the people who lived there were able to do it.
All this could be done since each puzzle opened up even if the puzzle hadn’t gone live and you could post through twitter in a way that it worked like a message board. That’s how people would begin to speculate and what not. Now, sometimes there wasn’t any place to find so fans still had to come up with something to pass the time until the next puzzle unlocked.
The translaytion feature of the site really worked perfectly and it was cool to solve with people around the world to figure out where the next puzzle would be. I hadn’t seen this level of team work like this in a long time, well maybe since the whole Shia Labeouf he will not divide us art project.
If you missed the game as it was online well you missed a heck of a time but at least you can still solve the puzzles. For the rest of the Layton World Puzzles click here. If you have any questions on the puzzles ask me on twitter @9sdp or email me [email protected]
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