Hotel Dusk: Room 215 (DS)

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Genre: Adventure
Players: 1
Online: None
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Developer: Cing
Publisher: Nintendo
ESRB Rating: T
Release Date: 1/22/07
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Hotel Dusk adds a number of fresh and interesting wrinkles to the adventure formula without fixing any of its established problems. It's a pleasant enough diversion, but it overstays its welcome and commits too many old errors to be a truly great game.

Everything in its Place
Adventure games have been pronounced dead a number of times over the years. Much of the time it seems as though the genre is just alive enough to enable all the pronouncements, and we're getting to the point where remarks about all the eulogizing are becoming cliché themselves. Regardless, adventure gaming clearly isn't dead enough to put a stop to games like Hotel Dusk: Room 215.

In Hotel Dusk, you'll assume the role of Kyle Hyde, noir detective and all around gruff jerk, as he explores the eponymous hotel and pries into the personal lives of every single guest. As you might imagine, it's the sort of game where you navigate conversation trees, solve object puzzles, and generally scour the world for the diminutive objects that represent the sole solution for simple problems. Hotel Dusk takes this core formula and ports it to the DS, where point-and-click genre veterans should feel right at home. Along the way, however, it adds some unique flourishes.

The most obvious is that the game is played with the DS rotated ninety degrees, so you hold it like a book. This tweak is a little rough on the wrists if you hold the DS for long play sessions, but it changes the screen orientations from landscape to portrait. It's mostly a cosmetic tweak, but adventure games are so often about story and stories are about people. The shift from landscape to portrait lets the game use big beautiful sprites that aren't marred by the DS's limited resolution, and the characters profit immensely in expressiveness and detail.

Outside the cinematics and conversations, the left/right orientation is used to present two different perspectives as you explore the hotel. The touch screen displays a schematic layout, much like a blueprint, where you direct Kyle by holding the stylus wherever you'd like him to go. On the opposite screen is a Kyle's eye view of the 3D hotel as it passes around you. It's an unusual twist to the typical, "map on one screen, gameplay on the other," DS design trope, and it makes navigation through the environment pleasantly accessible.

When Kyle encounters something interesting, the touch screen can be zoomed in to examine scene in greater detail. The touch interface is put to good use here; tapping or dragging the stylus across an interactive object causes it to glow, which helps ease the pain of scrubbing the screen. Of course, there's a generous supply of foils in the environment, but enough of the object descriptions are charming to make sifting through them worthwhile. Overall, it's a pretty good way to enhance the salience of puzzle-critical items without making the rest of the world seem empty and inconsequential, but there's still enough busywork that the system won't be winning over any new genre converts.

Sins of the Father
Unfortunately, while Hotel Dusk makes good use of the DS's feature set, it squanders most of that goodwill with painful kludge. For one thing, many of the game's puzzles succumb to that classic adventure genre flaw where finding the solution is an exercise in reading the designer's mind rather than problem solving. Just as an example, you'll be expected to remove the label from a wine bottle during the game. If you stop and reflect on it for a bit, you can probably come up with at least three ways to remove such a label, one of which doesn't require any special tools. However, in Hotel Dusk, there is exactly one item in the whole hotel that can remove a label and it's tucked away somewhere you mightn't expect. This is a design problem that has plagued the genre for twenty years, and while genre fans are probably inured to it, everybody else will likely be annoyed.

Compounding the problem is the fact that many of the puzzle-critical items in the game can't be picked up before the puzzle emerges. So, even if you think it might be useful to grab that rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle, you won't be allowed to until you're expected to take a zip line across a ravine. Even if you happen to remember that the item exists by the time you encounter the puzzle, you may be frustrated if you can't recall its exact location.

On the bright side, at least most of the puzzle solutions make sense. Hotel Dusk isn't a comedy adventure game, so most of the puzzles employ mundane objects in typical tasks, and the game is all the more accessible for it. Unfortunately, if you do find yourself stumped, it takes about a second to fade in and out of the inventory screen. So, with an inventory of thirty items, the old adventure standby of trying every plausible item can take a full minute. It doesn't seem like much time, but multiply that by however many foil objects are present in the environment, and you can find yourself fruitlessly clicking for long stretches.

Don't expect the game to help you along much either. There are no tutorials, hint systems, or other niceties to facilitate interruptible gameplay. Characters won't even repeat goals from previous conversations to help you get reoriented after taking a break from the game. There are summaries for each of the game's ten chapters, but they're largely useless for figuring out what to do from moment to moment. Fortunately, you can help yourself. The game provides a three-page memo pad for doodling anything you like. So, as long as you remember to jot down what you were doing before quitting, you should be able to pick up where you left off.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night
The story, ostensibly the reward for playing Hotel Dusk, is something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, it's rich and detailed. Kyle matches the classic noir detective archetype, and everyone he meets has a shady past that's primed for some good sleuthing. It intermixes with the gameplay as the meat of most conversations happens as you pick the particular way that Kyle interrogates his newfound acquaintances, and a lot of the game's fun comes from grilling people for information. Not all the character motivations ultimately make sense, but enough of it holds together and finding the truth is generally rewarding.

On the other hand, getting to those conversations is something of a chore. Most of the game's events are scripted for dramatic effect or to ensure that you pick up certain critical items. So if you don't intuit that you should walk somewhere at a critical juncture or grab some innocuous object, you'll often find yourself knocking on the doors of apparently empty hotel rooms for a lead. It should be a minor nuisance, but it happens often enough that playing Hotel dusk feels like a joke that starts with "knock knock," and just ends with more knocking.

While the story content is mostly good, the delivery doesn't always match up. Most of the characters are archetypes and shallow caricatures and can come off as unbelievable and silly. One in particular is an author whose "smart-guy" persona mostly leans on the kind of awkward verbosity that an elementary school student might use to feign an extensive education. Also, many conversations are mined with game-ending branches, and the price of failure is paging through all the text before you made the fatal error.

The sound is a bit odd because rotating the DS places both speakers on one side and makes everything monaural. Sadly, this isn't much of a loss. Most of the game's music is vaguely jazzy, but played on synthy instruments. It doesn't grate, but it's best forgotten. Though, in a somewhat dubious coup, Hotel Dusk manages to pick out some ambient music that captures the hotel lobby experience.

The game's art is mixed, but ultimately good. Navigating the hotel itself isn't particularly compelling, as the environments are bland and blocky. Characters are embedded in the environments as sprites in a 3D world, facing you regardless of your location. However, during conversations, characters become beautiful monochrome screen-dominating sprites. They're rendered as constantly fluctuating sketches, giving the whole game a pulp comic feel that helps tie the shallow characters and noir plot together. The game even adds a splash of color to the sprites at dramatic moments, which does a great deal to add emotion. Since so much of the game takes place in conversation, these sprites move the game's artistic tone beyond the dull hotel and make it vibrant.

Checkout is 10:00 a.m.
While Hotel dusk sports some smart art design and a fairly rich story, the genre kludge, repetitive play, and narrative delivery make the game's ten chapters feel like six with padding. Genre fans hungry for a fix won't mind most of the game's nuisances, but hardcore players may want to deprioritize Hotel Dusk and casual players should look elsewhere.


What It Costs: $27

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $10 (rent)
•To The Genre Fan: $20 (buy)
•To The Casual: $5 (rent)

tags: adventure, cing, hotel dusk: room 215, nintendo, review