After 14 or so hours I’ve finally completed Hotel Dusk: Room 215 on the Nintendo DS. You play Kyle Hyde, a retired detective who now works for a ‘recovery’ service, finding items for clients. 3 years earlier, Kyle found out his partner on the force, Brian Bradley, had double crossed him and was working for the gang they’d been trying to catch. Kyle shot him, but the body fell into the river and was never found. Kyle believes Bradley is still alive, and has spent his spare time ever since looking for him.
As the game opens, Kyle is sent to Hotel Dusk to pick up some items for a client. There he stumbles across various other guests at the hotel, each with their own stories and agendas, and comes to realise the Hotel may be the key to locating Bradley.
You play through a series of chapters: talking to the guests, searching rooms, and picking up items and information. Every so often one of two things happens: a puzzle, or an interrogation. Both occur natural during the course of the story, the former requiring you to use the different DS functions to solve a problem, the later consisting of choosing the right questions to ask the other characters. Get a puzzle wrong, you’re stuck until you figure it out. Get an interrogation wrong, it’s game over.
You hold the DS sideways, using the right screen to point to where you want Kyle to move and the left showing his POV. During conversations, characters appear on both screens as black and white illustrations (straight from A-ha’s Take On Me video).
I’ve seen a lot of reviewers describe it as a book, but that’s a little misleading. A book implies pages of text that you have to scroll through. Hotel Dusk’s more like the transcript of a play: almost entirely dialogue. What this means in practical terms is that you don’t scroll down a long page of text; you get two lines of dialogue and then have to hit the ‘next’ button. Which, considering just how long the conversations are, can get a little frustrating. The characters also have a tendency to repeat things, and if you make a mistake during interrogation it takes a while to get back to the same point (if you don’t save regularly it’s even worse).
Aside from that one quibble (which affects me more than average because of my low patience threshold), the game is fantastic. Great puzzles, nicely balanced difficulty, interesting story, good graphics and well designed levels. The music is a little hit and miss, but there are some tracks that work very well.
Some hints: use the ‘R’ button to skip through dialogue – it’s easier than tapping the screen every 5 seconds: look at everything you can as you go along, but you won’t be able to pick it up until you need it – don’t get frustrated, just remember where the unusual items are; there a two endings, the main one and one after you finish the game (I’ve still to see the second ending. This comes courtesy of wikipedia); you shouldn’t have to guess in interrogations – the choice always matches the character’s personality; save regularly – can’t stress this enough; and the one puzzle spoiler I’ll give (because I got stuck on it) – <Spoiler> when you hear the distant ‘thunk’ later on, check the trash can in the utility closet <End Spoiler>.
