MIDI Week Singles: "Puzzle 3" - Professor Layton and the Unwound Future (NDS)

 

"Puzzles 3" from Professor Layton and the Unwound Future on the Nintendo DS (2010)

Composer: Tomohito Nishiura

Album: Professor Layton and the Unwound Future Original Soundtrack 
Label: FRAME 
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Level-5

Being the third game in a series with a well established theme for when the game takes you from the narrative to solving a puzzle.  For the music that you are going to hear a lot of in this game, unless you are following a walkthrough or have the music itself turned off, would need to be calming to the point that you hear it, but that it is not distracting.  The last thing you would want as a composer is for the player to be so distracted by the music that it hinders their ability to solve the puzzle, and there being over 165 puzzles (per the game box).

Because the story of  Professor Layton and the Unwound Future is all about time, it makes sense that the puzzle theme for the game would take on a clock-like feeling.  The song is also coincidentally performed at 60 bpm, but the "Puzzle" theme from the first Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village was also written at the same speed, which I was very thankful for because I would have been a little sad had that not been the case.  Even the chime tone, normally performed with a piano has a coo-coo clock sound to it, and the only missing element would have been the sound of gears moving in the background as a percussive instrument.  But then again, that might create too much noise for a song that is supposed to not be distracting.  And maybe it comes later in the game/soundtrack; I am only a few hours in so I know I have a lot more game to go through.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental