Despite having been revealed in the February Nintendo Direct earlier this year, it looks like we are going to have to wait a while before we get our hands on Professor Layton and the New World of Steam as Level-5 has today revealed that the title is now scheduled to release in 2025.
Featuring in today's Vision Showcase, the publisher and developer shared a new gameplay trailer for the upcoming entry in the beloved DS puzzle series. This has provided our first idea of what the title will actually look like (remember, we have only seen cutscene footage so far) and it is all looking really rather neat.
As well as revealing that the gameplay will take place from a slightly different angle — notice how Layton and Luke now stand at the bottom of the screen — we also got a look at one of the available puzzles from QuizKnock (the team that will be handling the puzzle department this time around).
The important detail that made our heart sink a little, however, is that the game has been pushed to a 2025 release window. Level-5 boss Akihiro Hino made clear that this delay is to make sure that the team can release the best game possible (which we always like to see), but no more specific information can be provided for the moment.
Does this mean that the game is reserved for some kind of future hardware, then? With all the rumours pointing towards late 2024 for Nintendo's much-anticipated 'Switch 2', this is going to have to be cross-gen at the minimum, right?
A day of peaks and troughs for Layton fans, then. On the one hand, it looks like the nasty 3D art style has mostly been replaced by something that looks a little more natural (hooray!), but we still have a good long wait before we can actually get our hands on it. Will it all be worth it? We hope so!