There are many more involving interactions to be had, but revealing them might spoil the story. You’ll be required to solve several puzzles: from literally solving a child’s puzzle, to rifling through the trash for a hidden item. It’s in these trials where the game is most evolved and uses the touch-screen to the fullest effect. When something might prove useful to the over-arching story, (“Use Pet Bunny with Rusty Chainsaw”) you will be taken to a more interactive screen. Kyle will then offer a brief description (often with requisite witty banter) of any highlighted item. An icon will activate when something can be investigated, at which point you can pan the camera from left to right. Lefties can flip the DS around and use the buttons to navigate. You will have free reign to move around the hotel, either with the stylus or the control pad. The rooms in the hotel are three-dimensional for the most part. Rest easy, as you’ll be able to resume from the start of the conversation or from your previous save point if you fail. Yes, you can lose the game if you ask the wrong questions or make the wrong accusations. The lack of colour also does a service to these animations (aside from giving them a film noir feel), as the character avatars will literally turn a bright shade of crimson when your line of questioning is leading you towards an endgame. These run on loops of only a handful of sequences, but they do a very good job of indicating the mood and reactions of the characters. The most oft-used comparison is to the A-ha video for “Take On Me” and it turns out to be entirely accurate. Mysteries abound and it’s up to you to solve them.Īll of the inhabitants of the hotel are presented as black and white sketch animations. From check-in to checkout, the story unfolds much like an interactive novel (and in keeping with that, you play the game by tilting your DS sideways like a book), with a variety of fairly rich characters and environments. It happens that you too are missing someone: your ex-partner and turncoat Bradley. Ostensibly, you’re there to peddle your wares, but another more secretive facet of your job is to find things that go missing. You check into the titular Hotel Dusk just after Christmas in the tail end of the seventies. The game puts you in the gumshoes of Kyle Hyde, a former detective now masquerading as a traveling salesman. While the game doesn’t offer enough in the way of evolution to defy its predecessors, it does represent a welcome return to the fold for that favourite bastion of the 4-colour set. Is Hotel Dusk the long-awaited next iteration of the genre, or just another golden calf? Hence, “point-and-click” came to mean just that. The next evolution came with the home computer industry’s steady adherence to the mouse. Though Mavis Beacon may have had a stranglehold on the steno pools of our nation in the mid-eighties, a great many of the era’s electric youth (myself included) learned to type by playing games of this sort. Hotel Dusk: Room 215 has been heralded by many as the second coming of the point-and-click adventure games of old (the type that would assuage our sadistic wants with an authoritative “Cannot use Pet Bunny with Rusty Chainsaw”).
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