Hotel Dusk: Room 215

Screenshots

Notes

Hotel Dusk is somewhere between a visual novel and a point-and-click adventure game.
It's another DS title making some interesting use of the hardware: it's one of the handful of games that are played with the DS held sideways, "like a book".
It uses the touch screen almost exclusively with the only use of buttons to advance text when no other input is needed.

The game has not one but two puzzles which hinge on closing the DS lid!
I thought Phantom Hourglass was the only one!
Another weird hardware thing: there's a puzzle where you have to press two switches at once.
But the DS doesn't support multi-touch, pressing multiple points reads as the average location.
So the game expects to read you pressing one switch and then jumping to half way between them.
This was possible on the emulator by manipulating the pause function while moving the touch point.
Weird hack though.

I said it's part visual novel because there is a lot of text and dialog.
I got a bit frustrated as the text scrolls in slowly, with no option to speed it up or press a button to advance.
It's not voiced, so this just pads out the game when you can read text quicker than that.
I nearly always have text speed set to as fast as possible in games, I'm not sure I know anyone who has it on slower speeds given the choice.

There's a system in the dialog where you can sometimes interrupt when prompted to ask a question.
This system seemed a bit redundant as I basically always pressed it when given the option, and I think sometimes it would be required to get key dialog.
Also it always gives you an option of 2 questions but it's often not clear from the prompt what you're asking or how the two options actually differ.
If you fuck up and choose the wrong prompt you'll often "remember it" 5 seconds after you leave the conversation allowing you to have another swing.
That's just annoying really.

The point-and-click adventure aspect is fairly light, mainly walking around to find people to talk to with occaisional simple puzzles.
It keeps it pretty grounded compared to more comedic or out-there adventure games.
More "find a wire to pick this lock" than "use this rubber chicked to cross a zipline".
There are some touch screen minigames, which work OK aside from a few fiddly ones.

Graphically the game is pretty good.
There's a good mix of static 3D environments that you wander around and this sketchy hand-drawn style for dialog.
Cutscenes also make good use of the two screens side-by-side with effects that cross over or with characters facing each other.

So a lot of the game rests on the story.
It's kind of a noir detective style story.
The main character, Kyle Hyde, is an ex-NYPD cop who's looking for a former partner.
He turns up at the titular Hotel Dusk, and over the course of a single night you uncover the mysteries of his past which turn out to be conveniently linked to a bunch of people at the hotel.
It's really a slow burner and fairly focused on characters rather than a wild plot.

This game takes a while to get going.
The main character also has the classic "video game protagonist" personality where he pokes and pries into everything for no apparent reason, and engages in casual theft, breaking and entering rather than just asking for a hand like a normal human being.
You spend a fair amount of time early in the game doing fairly boring stuff, like "have dinner", "find your package that's been misdelivered", and "pay your hotel bill".
I thought the game might kick it up into high gear later but no, past half way in the game and we're still doing "figure out what wine someone had with dinner so you can give them the label they wanted".
I keep waiting for a dramatic inciting incident like a murder which has never come.

The dialog slips into really exagerated noir detective lingo at times.

The climactic puzzle is kind of dumb since it requires you to solve it within a time limit as you're locked in an airtight room.
But then solving the puzzle doesn't let you exit, someone else arbitrarily saves you.
The whole plot reveals in the last few chapters revolve around the fact the bad guys have hidden elaborate puzzles hiding their secrets in the hotel rather than just... not writing them down anywhere.

Ultimately Hotel Dusk fell a bit flat for me and I wanted to get it over with.
The story is about equivalent to a single Phoenix Wright case but it's stretched to an entire game.
The focus is more on realistic characters but none of them are that interesting or well written.
I can imagine a version of this game that's good, but Hotel Dusk doesn't quite get there.