It’s hard to believe the last Professor Layton game, Layton’s Mystery Journey, released in 2017. It feels like we’ve been waiting ages for his return, and at TGS 2025 I was getting some déjà vu seeing another demo for the 2026-slated Professor Layton and The New World of Steam. Unlike the TGS 2024 demo, which took place a good while into the game, this year’s demo—running on a docked Nintendo Switch 2, mind you—was the opening twelve minutes, or three puzzles.
The Professor spent most of this time acclimating to Steam Bison, a bustling post-Wild West American city in which everything runs on steam—cars, computers, robots, you name it. Layton spent the first few puzzles searching for his ward and sidekick, Luke Triton, now a young teenager at home in this steampunk world. Steam Bison (which just sounds to me like an F-Zero rig) is an exciting setting full of life and moving parts, and the 3D renderings of it and its assorted denizens look fantastic. The Professor Layton games always have stylish presentation, and this the best it’s ever been in terms of polish and character design for the many NPCs.
What really stood out for this new demo, though, were the Switch 2 mouse controls. I got to get my hands, or rather hand, on it, but honestly it was not my preferred method of play. For one, you must use buttons for things like progressing forward to new zones in the environment or for opening the questlog. It felt clunky and awkward wrapping my thumb down and over—perhaps it was the mouselike peripheral the Joy-Con 2 was locked into. In the second puzzle, I had to tickle the tummy of a “statue” to reveal it as a dude painted in bronze, click on his opening eyes, and then press the “+” button, all of which was annoyingly awkward to combine. Considering the game is releasing on Switch 1 as well (which doesn’t have Mouse Mode Joy-Con support), I think the best way to play would be using the touch screen in handheld mode, just as the Nintendo DS games were nearly twenty years ago (*hair whitens*).
The third and final puzzle was a classic stacking exercise with gears of ascending size. I had to load up a max of two or four gears, ship them across a river, and re-stack them in correct size order. It was the stuff that a smart chimpanzee would master for a handful of food, and only took a games journalist like me a couple minutes, unfortunately without the handful of food. Seeing as Akira Tago, former puzzle designer of the Professor Layton series, passed away just before the previous game’s release, all puzzle design in Professor Layton and the New World of Steam is being handled by QuizKnock, a popular quiz group on YouTube. I hope they can pack a couple hundred puzzles in the full game.
Though it wasn’t the most intellectually stimulating demo when compared with last year’s, I absolutely loved the graphics, music, Japanese voice acting (Yo Oizumi returns as Layton!), and overall presentation, and was thoroughly charmed as always. Having the option to play with a mouse in one hand and (unlike the restricted one-mouse demo) a second Joy-Con for buttons could be a great new choice.
Between having this game and Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road on display this year, it’s great to see Level-5 doing what they do best.
Professor Layton and The New World of Steam drops onto Switch 1 and 2 in 2026.
Professor Layton and The New World of Steam Media
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