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The Summer’s Hottest Video Game Hero Is a Brainy Jew Named Hershel

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Jewish mothers worried that their darling ones are spending too much time playing video games may find comfort in knowing that one of the summer’s hottest gaming titles features a well-educated young man who applies his considerable intellectual blessings to pursue justice and aid the needy. In a medium where protagonists are usually ripped and well-armed bruisers, this celebration of cerebral capabilities is uncommon, and it’s of little surprise that it should focus on a distinctly Jewish gentleman.

Meet Hershel Layton, a British scholar and the hero of a wildly popular franchise of games for Nintendo’s portable DS/3DS platform. The first game in the series, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, was released in Japan in 2007 and, together with the five sequels that followed, sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. Rather than require a rapid sequence of jumps and shots and punches and stabs, the Layton games unfurl at a leisurely pace: The professor and his sidekick, a young boy named Luke, become involved in fantastic mysteries involving supernatural elements and have nothing but their sechel to save them. The player, then, is tasked with solving a sequence of increasingly difficult puzzles, riddles, and other brain-twisters. How many times in the course of one day will a digital clock display three or more of the same number in a row? If you have a full 10-quart pitcher of milk, an empty 3-quart pitcher, and an empty 7-quart pitcher, how will you divide them so that the 10-quart pitcher and the 7-quart pitcher both hold exactly 5 quarts of milk? If you find yourself feverishly trying to solve these puzzles as you read, Layton is for you.

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