Brought to you by the team behind the wildly popular Brain Age, Brain Voyage is a clean, occasionally compelling collection of classic puzzle themes. The thin premise finds you hopping around the globe, solving puzzles loosely themed after major international cities and earning gold coins for your efforts. These gold coins--a bit of an unnecessary contrivance--allow you to purchase new cities on the map and access higher levels of the cities you've already visited. 16 distinctly different puzzles include some time-tested favorites, such as an entertaining Minesweeper update, an increasingly challenging adaptation of the classic card game Memory, a new take on the board game Mastermind, and an often frustrating set of Tangram-esque puzzles to solve. The quality of the more original puzzles vary widely: the "Carnival" mathematical challenge is a rewarding and thorough improvement on Yahtzee, while the South African aquatic counting game is a thin task indeed.
The level of performance required to earn gold medals varies widely across puzzles, and might in part diminish interest in returning to any of the challenges. Earning gold standing in Sydney's orchestral Simon clone, for instance, is nowhere near as demanding as fighting for silver in Cairo's sliding-piece picture puzzles. Also, some puzzles are perhaps overly reliant on chance at higher levels (refer to the entertaining poker-solitaire in the Las Vegas stage), while others require speed that necessitates action before much in the way of forethought when struggling for top scores (namely, Tokyo's number-crossword puzzle that closely resembles the "Challenger" found in many local newspapers). And regardless of difficulty or lack thereof, puzzles like India's "spot the number of differences in two moving pictures" will not inspire much enthusiasm.
Because of the variety of cognitive tasks involved, every player is likely to have a handful of favorite puzzles and an equal number they find absolutely nerve-wracking. It's ultimately the latter that keep me from returning to the game to up my high scores and collect the full complement of gold medals. All things told, an entertaining title that's a bit too slight for veteran DS puzzlers, but still promises a few nights of fun and frustration.