An e-book with some puzzles
User Rating: 6 | Hotel Dusk: Room 215 DS
You play as Kyle Hyde, an ex-cop turned door to door salesman for a company called Red Crown. However, Red Crown isn't a normal run company and Hyde knows he has been sent to Hotel Dusk to look for clues about his former partner Brian Bradley who went missing a few years ago. He arrives at Hotel Dusk and ends up buying the famous room 215. Here he waits for a package and his adventure begins. Hyde's attitude seems unnecessarily harsh and I found him quite a hard character to like but you do end up warming to him over the course of the game. However, there isn't much in terms of a game here. It does seem like it is supposed to be a point and click adventure but the puzzles are minimal and sparse. Each section of the game is about finding the correct person to talk with then moving onto the next one. After a certain amount of conversation occurs, the game time progresses. Annoyingly, even though the game is linear, you can 'fail' certain sections by selecting the wrong multiple choice dialog to ask a character. When this happens, the game does restart to before you started the dialog. The game is played with the DS being vertical giving you a top down map on the touch screen which you use to navigate, and the better graphics on the top screen which is to your left. The graphics seem to have a spooky hazy feel which could be suited to a horror game like Silent Hill rather than a point and click adventure; although it is a mystery game. The characters have a hand-drawn look which is a really cool effect. As the characters are introduced, Hyde begins to get suspicious of everyone and tends to stick his nose in everyone's business. It turns out he is right as most characters are hiding their past and coincidentally are linked to the games story of a murder mystery and a painting insurance scam. Basically, Hotel Dusk is a interactive story book with a complicated story which is quite hard to get your head around; although it does try its best to explain it all in the end sequence. It is a cool idea but it would have been nice if it was more interactive like other point and click adventures.
