A Hardy Developer's Journal – as written by indie adventure game developers

Layton and Luke are invited to a mysterious opera called “The Eternal Kingdom”

From the get-go, it is pretty clear that one of the main objectives of making the film was marketing the Professor Layton puzzle games. The DVD opens briskly with a trailer for Professor Layton and the Lost Future (you should skip it, if you haven’t finished the game yet!). But what about the movie itself? Is it more than just a marketing tool?
Can it stand on its own? (more…)

Puzzle Agent is the interactive reliving of Graham Annable’s Grickle. A surreal comic world of weird and unique stylised characters. Telltale have done a great job of brining Grickle to point and click – on a visual level. But does the game itself match up? Let’s see. (more…)

Puzzle games are hot. Professor Layton, Scribblenauts, World of Goo, even Bejeweled, they’re all making headlines, and rightly so. Puzzle games offer a way to escape from the normal world, where bosses, spouses, parents and others make life miserable, to a world where diabolical puzzles make your life miserable instead. But that’s about the only entertainment they offer. A puzzle book by Sam Loyd, no matter how entertaining, just isn’t the same as a novel by Jules Verne. Similarly, a puzzle game can’t replace the profound entertainment that’s offered by a traditional adventure game… or can it?

Enter Puzzle Bots. Puzzle Bots is an ambitious venture, in that it tries to marry two genres that, although related, at first glance appear not to have very much in common: (more…)