N-Philes

Hotel Dusk: Room 215

Posted October 21st 2007 by D. Cassandra Garcia.

Detective. Flatfoot. Gumshoe. Dick. That's you to the bone, but to the rest of the world you're just an average schnook. You are Kyle Hyde, former NYPD detective; betrayed, bitter and on the trail of your former partner. A down and out door-to-door salesman peddling useless household gadgets, with the agenda of tracking down the man that is the cause of your acrimonious attitude. Your employer, Red Crown, sends you on a mission to track down a few items. It's December 28th, 1979 and you arrive at the seemingly abandoned Hotel Dusk, a rundown little hotel in the middle of L.A. It's here that your investigation will commence as a story unfolds in the palms of your hands.

Hotel Dusk is an interactive mystery novel on the Nintendo DS, and to play you hold the handheld "Brain Age" style: like a book, length-wise up and reading along. And if you don't have the intellectual hunger for a game like Brain Age, or you have a short attention span, you might as well stop reading because this is not a game for you. Hotel Dusk is an investigative, problem-solving game that makes you think. It makes those inner gears grind as you try to manuever your way around the hotel, solving mini-mysteries while ultimately trying to solve the one that's been haunting you (well, Kyle) for over three years.

It was then, three years ago, that your partner betrayed you and you shot him, his body never found. Now, working for Red Crown as a modest salesman, you also have a side job. Red Crown's side-enterprise is "finding" things for people, making you somewhat like a private eye/skiptracer; you perform these tasks alongside your personal search for Bradley, your disgraced partner. Ending up at the Hotel Dusk on a new assignment, you sense that perhaps Bradley had been there recently and find yourself dropped into the middle of a web of mini-mysteries, courtesy of the hotel staff and patrons. Because of your natural born bloodhound isntincts, you can't help but try to solve the mini mysteries, and before you know it the entire story becomes an intertwined web all leading back to that one big case. It's a noir crime drama if there ever was one, and, as requisite, it's equipped with some of the most stylized graphics the highly-touted handheld has seen thus far.

Not since Aha's "Take on Me" video, has such a use of Rotoscoping been done so engagingly (not counting Richard Linklater's resume). Sure, Hotel Dusk isn't the first video game to employ such a style, but it works better than most. The characters on screen are typically portrayed in sketchy black and white pencil animations, only briefly appearing in color if they aren't talking to you or are in the background. But only people appear in black and white. The rest of the hotel, from items you "find", to various rooms you need to explore, everything else is like a messy coloring book. The backgrounds are done in muted colors, enhancing the gritty detective feel. Colors are not really uniform, but the lo-fi style comes across best when the artists color outside the lines.

Like the style, Hotel Dusk isn't a completely original idea. Cing took all the best elements of what they had done with Trace Memory, tweaked them and then added them beautifully to Hotel Dusk. While the graphical and storyline ideas may not be brand new, the melding of the two works so well together that one can only wonder why this isn't a standard amongst point-and-click adventure games. The control, of course, rises above the standard for the genre.

There isn't a whole lot of manuevering that isn't simply sliding your stylus around to check out a room and then clicking on an object to get a closer inspection, but many of the puzzles require using your brain to determine how exactly to move past this obstacle. For instance, one part of the game has Kyle needing to check the back of a piece of paper, and to do so you have to close the DS and the reopen it, finding the paper flipped over. In another, getting an item out of a cardboard box means flipping the DS upside down and shaking it until the item falls out. Even a child could handle the controls to this game, but the developers went all out making uses of the handheld that were never thought of as gameplay possibilities, all for the benefit of resourceful gamers.

Hotel Dusk has a few flaws, but nothing a new coat of paint couldn't fix. The one aspect of this sleuthing sim that goes against the stylized grain is the music. At first unobtrusive, the repetition of the same dozen or so songs soon wears thin. Different situations get different themes, which is fine, but the mellow elevator jazz just tried too hard. While you can access all of the songs played throughout the game when you make your way into the bar by playing the jukebox, the music outside of the bar isn't affected. It's not that the soundtrack is bad, it's pretty good for what it is, it just doesn't work as fluidly as Hotel Dusk deserves.

Unfortunately, the replayability of an interactive novel is roughly equivalent to that of a paperback novel. Yes, you may receive a bonus scene if you complete the game without any major screw-ups, but realistically speaking, once you figure everything out, you're done. And if you don't, you just get a game over anyway, so the only replayability factor is if you get a game over before the game is truly over. Perhaps after a few months you'd forget how to get around and be able to be challenged again and when you do, you'll recall what a fantastic game this really is.

Heartstopper - This hotel's definitely worth checking in.

Hotel Dusk is one of the more unique games out of a long list of unique games to come out on the DS. From a graphical look, to a gripping storyline, this is definitely a winner. While Hotel Dusk is not a title for fans of arcade or action games, it is a thinking man's game, utilizing the sexiest muscle of them all: your brain. Fans of mysteries, crime dramas and even puzzle games will enjoy this latest Cing title, but honestly, just about any fan of good storytelling should check into the Hotel Dusk, even if it's just for the night.

Posted in: Reviews

Comments (0) | Permalink | Digg | Reddit