Welcome to the Hotel California! Such a lovely place! Such a love... yeah this is Hotel Dusk, forget about the Eagles...
User Rating: 9.2 | Hotel Dusk: Room 215 DS
Hotel Dusk is not a game by the time you finish it, it's more of an experience. It came to a point that whilst playing, opening that DS Lite was less like starting a new play session and more like being magically transported through the screen (A-ha style) and into the actual Hotel for a visit. The walls are grimy, the whole retro vibe is a time warp, the first person view, even with basic, some might say crude 3-D graphics sucks you in. And the implementation of story and character is quite brilliant, adding rich, complex layers to your visit. A reason to love this game is the lead character, possibly the biggest badass in the history of videogames: Kyle Hyde and he doesn't need a gun or steroid injections to claim that title. He has attitude, he has character. This is a man who takes no **** from anybody and frequently sees fit to berate people who annoy him, dominating other people with the implied threat of verbally expunged violence. It's likely that you'll fall in love with this character within the first few minutes when he cheerlessly berates a young child who is causing a nuisance, you can almost sense that he's one step away from clocking her one. But at heart Kyle Hyde is just that: All Heart. And he shows it by helping most of the cast members of this backwater hotel, in a round about fashion and not without drama. The way the game is put together is almost like witnessing psychological therapy, with each character having trauma, conflict and breakthroughs and when they make those breakthroughs you are right there with them, experiencing that high, half crying in joy, as you will them on to the next phase of their lives. Leave the past behind you and go on - you think - no matter how hard it is. It's almost impossible to discuss this game at length because of its reliance on its superb writing, the way that the threads are woven, knotted and de-tangled is quite a spectacle and you'll find yourself totally engrossed, for hours at a time un-weaving them. It will however take time, as your introduction to this world is a tough one; the controls. Navigating in the first person using a touch screen map is easy enough.....until you start looking at the top screen and get very easily dis-orientated. It's Metroid Hunters style navigation, only sideways and minus a D-pad and it can be quite frustrating until you get the hang of it (which you WILL, eventually). Apart from the story the best parts of Dusk come from it's micro-transactions as I call them: the small payoffs for object manipulation. You are presented with unique situations where you have to manipulate various objects with the touch screen which demonstrate how diversity and versatility embolden the game design. It's both a rare high and an unfortunate highlight of the scarcity of these sections. It needed much more. This game has foibles and they are big ones, the biggest being a statement of fact: This is an Adventure game, pure bred and it has all the associations and benefits and detriments of games of the past. There is a reliance on triggered events, hunting down obscure items, using circular logic, attempting to trigger something you thought had been triggered, some plain unfair disguising of crucial evidence. Before the age of online faqs, this may have been a huge barrier for this game and there are sections which downright pissed me off. You'll find yourself knocking, pointlessly on endless doors trying to trigger a reaction. Mostly it's your own fault, you have a notebook, so use it. Really use it to chart what you've done and what you have to do. Use it often and use is wisely because it will make your visit go much more smoothly. One thing that must be said about Hotel Dusk is that Phoenix Wright comparisons are both valid and not valid in equal terms. Phoenix Wright has the creative licence to do whatever it wants, ghosts, aliens, flying pigs with rockets up its ass, whatever. Hotel Dusk plays it straight down the line so if you're expecting regular wisecracks that have you rolling in laughter you'll be disappointed. Kyle Hyde and co are tragic figures, real people who hurt, deeply in some cases, filled with remorse and trying to understand the world and the hand that's been dealt to them. It's a truly mature game, not in trivial matters like blood, swearing or physical violence but in that it deals with adult matters and serious ones, marital breakdown, physical disability, ageing, murder, abduction, love, loss and regret. And it plays it totally straight.
By the end of the game you wont have even reached a solid resolution, it's a story that leaves you wanting more, that has you thinking back on your stay and wondering what happened to several characters, you learned about during that time. It's not a negative at all, it's like all the best stories, the true ones. It took me 18hrs to beat this game so it's quite substantial.
