The mask has the ability to grant wishes to its wearer. Layton and Luke arrive at the town to see they are too late, as a mysterious man is using the power of the mask to turn people to stone. Layton and Luke task themselves with solving the mystery of Montdol and the Mask of Miracles.

This fifth game in the Professor Layton series makes more use of the physical button controls for puzzle-solving as opposed to just the touchscreen. To take advantage of the hardware capabilities of the Nintendo 3DS, the characters are rendered in polygons outside of cutscenes, as opposed to sprites, in addition to other polishings of the interface.

Beside the regular adventure where you traverse the town, talk to the characters and solve puzzles, there are several mini-games that get gradually unlocked as you play and find the unlockable items:

• Bunny - after a while, you will stumble upon a circus bunny that isn't performing well and decide to help it along. This will require constant training of new moves which will become available over time as you acquire them. After you teach the bunny new moves, you will be able to instruct it to use those moves during the theatrical performances. Theatrical performances consist of a director telling you what the story is about and what he wants to see in each scene, and you will have to instruct bunny to act accordingly, providing you have taught it the moves necessary to perform the full play.
• Robot - after you acquire a toy robot from one of the street vendors, you will be able to play levels that will become gradually available. Levels are rectangular in shape and you can move your robot left, right, up or down through the field of squares. Each movement uses some of the battery and you have to reach the end square before the battery depletes which still gives you a lot of time for trial and error. Single movement will move your robot by three steps unless it bumps into a wall or picks up some special items that may temporarily boost its power to eat through the wall and enemies that move in pre-defined patterns.
• Shop - helping the friend in need, as a true gentleman, this mini-game will let you order the items in the store so that when customer comes to buy what he or she wants, the rest of the items also catch his/her eye and in turn you end up selling all your wares. Base item is initially set in the store, and you can place other items only adjacent to already placed items in the store. What will catch the eye of the customer after purchasing some item is the adjacent item that is either of the same type or of the same color. Placing two similar items might confuse the customer due to ambiguity which may lead the customer to stop buying after a while if the net remaining adjacent item has no connection to the last item he or she purchased.

Beside mini-games there are many collectible items you can find during your exploration and some of the flashback sub-stories become available after certain key events which can then be watched as short episodes where characters vary from event to event, and might not even be one of the leading three characters