Games that give your gray matter a workout

Riddle me this: If two puzzle games are traveling on two trains, one coming from the north, the other arriving from the south, the former chugging along at 33 mph and the latter zipping along at 103 mph but weighed down by a car full of wet ferrets, which game will be more fun to play — the one that stars a man in a fancy top hat and a boy with an adorable British accent, or the one that features a bunch of wayward fish trying to make their way to open water?

Hint: Each ferret is wearing a tiny red fez.

Give up? Not to worry. Riddles are hard!

As it turns out, the answer is: Both video games are equally engaging and fun to play.

Yes, recent weeks have found two very different puzzle games arriving on two very different handheld systems. But both "Professor Layton and the Curious Village" for the DS and "Downstream Panic" for the PSP have much to offer gamers looking to give their gray matter a good workout, and both are well-worth sinking your hard-earned coin — not to mention your precious time — into.

And sink your time you will.

Curiouser and curiouser
"Professor Layton and the Curious Village," in particular, has a curious way of making hours of one's life disappear — poof — in a puzzle solving haze.

Puzzle fanatics — especially traditional puzzle fanatics — will enjoy this endearing and unique little title, one that gives something of a modern makeover to some age-old brainteasing traditions.

As the beautifully animated opening sequence reveals, the famed Sherlock Holmes-esque puzzle master Professor Layton and his apprentice, a young lad named Luke, are on a mission to solve a mysterious inheritance dispute. A wealthy baron has died and hidden a treasure within the eccentric village of St. Mystere. You, the player, must help this duo get to the bottom of where the treasure is hidden while also uncovering and then solving some 130 puzzles secreted throughout the town.

Overall, the game plays out in point-and-click adventure style (or rather, point-and-tap — since this is the DS we're talking about). That is, you'll search the town and question the townsfolk (a truly oddball cast of characters), looking for clues to help you solve the various mysteries doled out as the story progresses and things get curiouser and curiouser. What exactly is the treasure known as the "Golden Apple" that Baron Reinhold hid before his death? What is the mysterious noise that shook the entire Reinhold Manor upon Professor Layton's first visit? And who has stolen the crank to the drawbridge sealing Professor Layton and all of the townsfolk in?

Meanwhile, you'll also dig up the dozens of brainteasers hidden in every nook and cranny, and it's these puzzles that are the meat of the game.

The puzzles themselves are of varying difficulty and of varying styles — logic puzzles, geometry puzzles, perception puzzles, card tricks, riddles, mazes and more. One puzzle, for example, will ask you to figure out how to get eight wolves and eight chicks across a river on a boat, two at a time, without the wolves eating the vulnerable little birds. Another will ask you to separate seven pigs each into their own pen using only three ropes.

Meanwhile, one riddle goes like this: The first letter of the alphabet is A, and the letter B comes after the letter A. However, the letter you need to worry about is the last one. What's the last letter of the alphabet? Here's a hint: it isn't Z.

Here the DS's touch screen gives players a truly hands-on puzzle-solving experience. In the wolves and chicks problem, for example, you'll use the DS's stylus to move the animals onto the boat and across the river, trying to get the combination right without leaving too few chicks on shore with too many ravenous wolves. In another puzzle, you'll use the touch screen to move eight different weights onto and off of a scale, trying to figure out in only two moves which one of those weights is lighter than the others.

If you find yourself, perhaps, staring at the screen for who knows how long, struggling to figure out how to get a bunch of wolves and chicks to live happily ever after together, never fear, there is help to be had. Coins are hidden throughout the town, and this loot can be used to buy hints should you need them.

Beyond the puzzling itself, "Professor Layton" features some beautiful animations and a lovely art style that delivers a town full of colorful imagery and even more colorful characters. The music and sound design is equally top-notch. And the balance between story and puzzling (not to mention the great variety of puzzles doled out apace) keeps things constantly interesting.

Ultimately, this is a really enjoyable brain-training game that, thank goodness, doesn't play like yet another "Brain Age" knockoff.

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