Hotel Dusk: Room 215 review (DS)

Over the past little while, I’ve played a great many games. Some I’ve played to review them and some I’ve played for sheer entertainments sake. They’ve been on a number of formats, and they’ve been of varying quality and have been heralded by varying degrees of hype. Generally speaking, it’s been software on my trusty DS Lite that has kept me going. Then I came to Hotel Dusk: Room 215.

Justice For All!

The game has received a reasonable bit of press in the run up to its release Stateside and in the UK, though I can’t find a set release date for it over here (it's been announced for April this very morning - Ed.). It would be criminal for this not to be released over here, as Hotel Dusk is just brilliant, restoring my faith in gaming after a glut of over-hyped, unimaginative dross (Gears of War et al, I’m looking at you).

You might remember a little game called Another Code: Two Memories which appeared a while back. A quirky, old-school, point-n-click adventure, it was fun, though it suffered mildly from ‘take the red flower to the alligator to get the scarf needed to fly the aardvark’ logic and was over too soon. Clearly, Cing Inc. learned every lesson possible and ploughed it into Hotel Dusk: Room 215. This is a game that completely works with the DS platform. Solid, entertaining and quirky in all the right ways – if there was any justice in the world, this should shift thousands of copies and DS’s. Only it probably won’t because it’s not mainstream or something. Growl…

Not Always About A Dame

Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is a slice of American noir crime so thick that you expect Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre to fall out of the DS when you pick it up. OK, so it’s set in late seventies LA, but this is a gumshoe dime novel through and through. The plot is intricate, the characters perfect in their one-dimensionality and the setting is so seedy you could sow a field with it.

You play Kyle Hyde, a former NYPD police detective who now works as a travelling salesman. Fortunately, an ex-LAPD chap runs the company Hyde works for, and he has a nice sideline in finding things that don’t always want to be found. As you do. You head to Hotel Dusk on a job to find a jazz-mag (kiddies – ask your dad) and a little red box. That’s the set-up, on with the show.

Three years earlier, Kyle shot his police partner after the guy went bad. Bradley, the bent copper in question, fell into the river and vanished, presumed dead. Hyde is convinced Bradley isn’t dead and has been looking for him ever since. Almost immediately on arriving at Hotel Dusk, Hyde discovers he might well have been right.

The Hotel is stuffed to the rafters with secrets and an amazing variety of characters – mute babes with mysterious pasts, an ex-con barkeep, an incognito actress, a famous author with a bad beard, and so on. Each character has a story to be uncovered, and all of the stories interlink through Hotel Dusk – a building so steeped in history it is a character in itself.

By The Book

The story is deliciously contrived, but in a way that completely suits the genre and is absorbing because of it. The 70’s setting isn’t taken advantage of much, but that’s no bad thing as it might only have gotten in the way. Instead, the unique atmosphere of the Hotel itself takes centre stage.

Holding the DS like a book (right or left handed by your preference), you navigate the hotel on a top-down map on the screen on the side you hold your stylus in, and a first-person 3D view of your surroundings plays out as you move on the opposite screen. Find something to look at and the magnifying glass icon flashes.

Touch it for a zoomed in view on the touch screen that allows you to pick things to read about on the opposite screen. Find someone to talk to, and a conversation starts, one protagonist per screen, their speech text appearing under them for you to peruse.

There’s a lot of reading to do in this game, hence the fact that you hold the DS like the aforementioned dime novel. From item descriptions to Kyle’s introspective monologues, from conversations to newspaper clippings, there’s a lot of text herein. Fortunately, that text is readable, straight to the point (mostly), and fun. Unfortunately, the amount of brain work in Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is one of the things that’ll condemn this little gem to a niche market.

Easy On The Eye (And The Hand)

The graphics in the game are nicely stylised, with the characters almost always presented in a monochrome, pencil-sketch style. Remember A-ha’s video ‘Take On Me’? Like that, only not annoying. The surroundings are nicely realised in colour, and the limited number of locations work well to create a claustrophobic atmosphere.

The controls are damn near perfect, though the stylus was fiddly on exactly two occasions. Both times, a small item needed to be picked off a larger selectable item that it was sitting on. The puzzles have a logic largely consistent with the game world and the fiction, so there’s limited random wandering about to do so long as you think before you act.

Sometimes the solution to a puzzle is obvious, but you can’t go straight to that solution until you’ve completed the compulsory bits in between. That can grate, but not often. In true noir style, your clever solutions may not always give the positive results you were expecting.

The way the DS is used is very clever, with certain puzzles having solutions that require the gamer to think way outside the box but in an obvious-after-the-fact way that will make you smile. Example – how do you flip something over that isn’t on the touch screen and can’t be manipulated with button pushes? Think you know? Go buy the game and see if you’re right.

On Top Of The World, Ma!

It would be foolish of me to say that Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is perfect. It has its faults – the music gets on your nerves after a while (nice though it is to begin with), and the fact you can’t speed up text delivery on first viewing is a slight pain. However, the game gets so many other things so utterly right that you will forgive its little mistakes. Nice touches, like being able to stop and make a note in your handwriting on an in-game notepad, heavily outnumber the problems.

Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is more than the sum of its parts, and those parts are damn fine. The final score below of an 8 is a practical mark for something that feels like a 9 out of 10 game. It is a fantastic yarn beginning to end, with a satisfactory noir ending that leaves just enough unresolved stuff to allow a possible sequel. There are even things you can miss doing that don’t prevent you finishing, but that may tempt you to check in again to Hotel Dusk.