Come for the visuals, stay for the story.
The game starts with an eye-popping cutscene that sets the mood for the rest of the game. You're Kyle Hyde -- an ex-cop who couldn't go on after his partner betrayed him -- and he now finds work as a door-to-door salesman for a not-so-black-and-white company called Red Crown. You're ordered to do a job at a place called Hotel Dusk. Here, you'll guide Kyle through puzzles, characters and hopefully the truth to your friend's betrayal. It's an extremely compelling read throughout, the character are three-dimensional and the writing is razor sharp. Every single character is likable and not likable for all the right reasons. These characters feel real, and it's easy to feel sympathetic or pissed at their character revelations.
The game also does everything in its power to keep you on track by making you take quizzes at the end of each chapter when Kyle reorganizes his thoughts. Excellent chapter summaries also keep you on the road if you happen to take a long break. The only knock is how some of the revelations are extremely obvious hours before they happen, making some of the conversations frustrating. Other than that little knock, the story pushes along at a steady, deliberate pace as you slowly uncover the hotel's secrets and the answer Kyle's been looking for all these years. Hotel Dusk is all about the story, so you're either going to take it or leave it at this point.
The game also has you hold the DS sideways, reinforcing the notion that you're interacting with an excellent mystery novel. The game spans an entire day, and each chapter's divided up into 1 or 2 hours. Time doesn't fly by in real-time, though. When you solve a puzzle, find something of importance, etc. time will move on. You move Kyle by tapping on the touchscreen (which is also a map) and Kyle will move to where you're pointing. The left screen shows the actual 3-D world that Kyle sees. It's effective, simple and basically acts as a more free-form version of the point-and-click. Points of interest can be further scrutinized by tapping on the magnifying glass icon, giving you a cleaner view of what you want to check out. Puzzles are fairly logical and most of them will pose little challenge, with a handful of them forcing you to put some thought.
Character interactions too are fairly simple until you start shaking the truth out of them. If you happen to choose the wrong answer, the game will promptly slap a Game Over at your face, forcing you to either load up a previous save or retry at a checkpoint. Overall, Hotel Dusk is an adventure game in every sense of the word, for better and for worse. It follows adventure game conventions step-by-step, so some of the event triggers are extremely obscure and stupid, leaving you hopelessly lost. An in-game notebook that you can write on helps you keep tabs on everything, but sometimes wandering around the halls proves to be the best solution.
Visually, it's totally something else. While the 3-D levels that you navigate are the standard, pixel-laden levels that have become commonplace on the DS, most of your time is spent talking. And here is when the game takes off, visually. The characters in the game look like rough sketches, with sketch shadows constantly jumping up and down. The effect is the illusion that the characters are constantly moving, making them even more appealing than they should be. Their animations are also handled incredibly well, it's quite striking to see even a simple nod or wave goodbye. It looks like something out of a classic noir tale, so it suits the game perfectly. The audio attempts to strike up some jazzy pieces to accentuate the mood, but the for the most part, the music sounds like something when an operator puts you on hold. A couple of pieces feel genuinely classy and rich, but for the most part, the audio never elevates past competent. The game could've benefited from some voice acting, but alas, there is none. A couple tiny snippets would've been nice, but oh well.
Hotel Dusk is an adventure game that does everything an adventure game sets out to do -- tell a compelling story with great characters -- and Hotel Dusk does it with style. The game should last anywhere between 10-20 hours, depending on how attentive you are during conversations. You can also save over a complete game, which will grant you worthwhile extra scenes on the game's ending. Hotel Dusk does little to advance the adventure genre, bringing the same strengths and weaknesses that have followed this genre to a near death, but it's still a great game nonetheless. If you've been itching for a great adventure game, definitely pick this up without hesitation.