Hotel Dusk: Room 215 Review

Having previously brought the adventures of Ashley Robbins in the Nintendo DS adventure title, Another Code: Two Memories, Nintendo and Cing have once again teamed up to bring something a little bit different to the Nintendo DS.

Billed as a tense detective thriller, Hotel Dusk: Room 215 takes place during a solitary day in 1979 and finds players assuming the role of Kyle Hyde, a former NYPD detective, down on his luck and currently working as a door-to-door salesman. During a seemingly routine stay at the titular hotel, Hyde's visit soon becomes more then what it initially seems, in a storyline that involves forgery, theft, broken relationships, and plenty of ghosts to chase.

Requiring players to hold the DS horizontally in a similar fashion to Brain Training, Hotel Dusk: Room 215 immediately sets itself out from the crowd, coming across as an interactive novel, or perhaps closer to the Pulp Fiction of the 1950s. Using the stylus to guide Kyle around the hotel with an overhead map, the second screen is employed stylishly to portray a 3D representation of the surroundings. Employing a unique visual style to depict the various characters that's best described as a homage to A-Ha's 1985 hit "Take On Me", Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is definitely skewed towards those who like things a little different.

Graphite Filings On The Plug

For the most part, Hotel Dusk: Room 215 plays closely to the old-school point 'n' click adventures, challenging players to investigate the hotel, using whatever Hyde comes across to solve the many puzzles that stand in his way. Although a handful of the puzzles will leave you chomping on the end of your stylus, Hotel Dusk rarely reaches the level of obscurity that the genre is famed for. Instead, the gameplay blend encompasses Phoenix Wright styled interrogations and dialogue, along with a handful of more action-based mini-games that take advantage of the DS capabilities.

As an interactive novel, Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is skewed heavily towards wading through pages and pages of dialogue, almost to the point of making the biggest literary fan grow impatient with the slow pace and plodding tempo. The puzzles and actual gameplay seem to appear few and far between the reams of speech, which lends itself to a little bit of criticism regarding the balance of the game; sure, Hotel Dusk: Room 215 feels sufficiently different to everything else as a result, but you're often left wishing for something to actually play rather then just read.

That said, the storyline that runs beneath Hotel Dusk is engaging enough to keep you plodding through, a level beyond the narrative typically employed in videogames and a real attraction to fans of detective novels. Coincidences soon begin to stack on top of one another, as the stories and secrets of the small group of guests soon come together and help Hyde on his primary task of discovering the reasons behind his former partner's double-cross three years previously. Delving too far into the storyline would ruin the experience completely, though it is worth noting that the climax fails to really provide any genuine surprises and you'll probably have worked out what's going to happen a long time before Hyde seems to come to the same conclusion.

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Hotel Dusk: Room 215 creates a fair illusion of non-linearity; however, closer inspection reveals that the game largely sticks to a fixed path and refuses to let you get too far from not asking the crucial questions, despite the odd occasional choice apparently sending you on a different path.

Given that conversation plays such a large role in the game, it's a shame that this largely boils down to the aged method of choosing responses, until everything has been checked from the list and the game can progress. It would have been great to feel that your choices have an impact on the way the game progressed, perhaps leading to multiple endings and an enhanced sense of freedom; as it stands, Hotel Dusk: Room 215 feels similar to the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks that were popular during the 1980s, just without the same level of interaction.

Occasionally Hotel Dusk: Room 215 will throw a Game Over at you if you choose the wrong options during a crucial conversation, which comes as a surprise given the game's standing, but you're quickly back into the game and questioning exactly what purpose it serves beyond embellishing the trial-and-error nature of the game. More often, the wrong choice will simply result in the conversation beginning from the start again, which feels cheap and breaks any sense of illusion that the game has created.