The archaeologist Professor Layton and his apprentice Luke are on a journey to discover the mystery of the Elysian Box which is said to kill anyone that opens it. The game is essentially a collection of a wide variety of puzzles (138 in total), wrapped in a story.
You will navigate around the area by selecting the move icon, then clicking the arrows to move to the next area. In each area, there will be a few items you can click on to gain a Hint Coin, or a person to interact with.
People will give you some dialogue and often present you with a new puzzle to solve. It's always forced scenarios, like "this reminds me of a puzzle I was once told", "I'm bored, let me see you solve this puzzle". Sometimes it does tie into the story, but most of the time, it is really arbitrary scenarios.
The puzzles are very varied and can be anything; Maths, block, logic and more. The puzzles were of varying quality too. I found some descriptions hard to make sense of because some were a bit ambiguous. Some puzzles didn't work too well on the small screen like when you basically have to spot the difference between two low resolution images. You can use your Hint Coins to see 3 progressively “helpful” hints, although I found most of the hints to be incredibly unhelpful regardless. I also found the difficulty to be all over the place. During the first half of the game, there were many frustrating moments where I was baffled, yet the final part of the game didn't seem to pose much challenge.
You can write notes/working out using your stylus, but I was disappointed there wasn't an eraser tool. You only have the option of clearing all your notes, and not specific sections.
When you solve a puzzle, you are awarded with "Picarats", with tougher puzzles having a greater reward. If you provide an incorrect answer, the amount of Picarats are lowered and you have to try again. Picarats apparently give you rewards at the end of the game, but I didn't bother checking out the post-game content.
Some of the dialogue is voice acted and you see some video cutscenes which is impressive. I wasn't a big fan of the story since it never really develops until the final moments and seemed a bit mystical.
I found Professor Layton And Pandora's Box to be a bit underwhelming. The puzzles seemed a bit of a mixed bag, and I expected the story to be something you could work out, rather than going down a fairly obscure route in the game's climax.