Eighteen and a half hours. That's how long I spent in the world of Hotel Dusk: Room 215 on my first playthrough.
I didn't know at first whether I could make it through the whole thing. You see, when the review copy arrived and I first fired it up, it took my wife and I a full ninety minutes to work through half of the first chapter. It wasn't that the puzzles were hard or the game system was difficult—in fact, folks who played Trace Memory will find themselves right at home with an only slightly-changed system—but that we were being fed what seemed at the time to be interminable amounts of text. And frankly, it was dull. The last thing we wanted was to listen to what seemed to be an endless parade of characters going on about pointless things.
Looking back on it now, however, I wonder if perhaps that initial feeling resulted from a stroke of storytelling genius on Cing's part. During the first part of the game, protagonist Kyle Hyde doesn't really seem like he cares either. Everyone's trying to talk his ear off or get him to help with some insignificant problem, and he's just got a job to do and a personal mission to fulfill. But by time that first chapter was done, Hyde (and, by extension, we) started to care. Through him, we were picking up on the trail of some intriguing mysteries, and we listened with rapt attention every time someone stopped Hyde in the hallway. or we tracked someone down to ask them some questions—hopefully bringing him closer to his personal goal of finding out what happened to his missing partner from his cop days.
In Hotel Dusk, you explore the hotel grounds by leading Hyde around on an overview map with your stylus, and when you approach a person or area of interest, icons light up allowing you to have a conversation or inspect the area, respectively. The former is the meat of the game, letting you hold text dialogues with just about anyone else you encounter. During these dialogues, Kyle will internalize questions that come up in response to things said. Many of these questions can be asked of the person he is currently talking to, while others that must be asked of someone else. Kyle will also, though much more rarely, get questions to ask from items he may find or puzzles solved while searching the game's environs.
The person Kyle is conversing with can also be interrupted at key points when an appropriate icon appears, allowing you to add your two cents from a couple of choices. You can opt not to interrupt if you wish, though we never did intentionally. Sometimes, asking the wrong question or saying the wrong thing can lead to a path being closed off to you, or even get you in such hot water that your game will end. Though the game does necessarily follow a largely linear path, the way characters reacted to your decisions lent the story a personal sense of attachment. While some dialogue choices were blatantly obvious (do we ask a meaningful question or just lob insults?), others had us sitting and scratching our heads for a moment to figure out how we should proceed, lest we lose an opportunity to get the information we needed.
Much attention has been paid to the artistry in the character headshots, and for good reason. Although it won't be long before you can pick out the somewhat limited repertoire of emotions each character has animations for—as the game is mostly dialogue-driven, you'll be staring at them a lot—they are all very well-animated and almost always add that extra bit of immersion to the story. The characters are even drawn slightly differently, if you look closely; the "hard-nosed" owner of the hotel, for example, is drawn with heavy, hard, dark strokes, while a mysterious young girl you'll meet is sketched with light, almost translucent stokes, giving her an ethereal quality.
With all that Cing got right telling the story, it almost felt like we were playing an entirely different game when the DS-centric puzzles came up. To their credit, none seemed contrived—they all fit as part of the story; to their detriment, many were implemented very poorly. One puzzle had us spending time in countless retries: the first time, I'd tried to move a particular item as far as I could, and the game registered that I'd "dropped" it—making a loud noise when I was supposed to be quiet, and ending the game. When given an opportunity to try again, I assumed I'd done something wrong; so I tried countless ways of doing it differently until, in exasperation, I simply tried the same thing again—this time succeeding. Another "puzzle" stumped us for some time simply because it was very poor at detecting what it was asking us to do. Not all puzzles were like this, thankfully; some were even rather clever and didn't have any technical problems—but the number that were simply frustrating to do properly, even when we knew what to do, was far too high.
With the puzzles being a somewhat-persistent thorn in our side, we were pleased to see that Hotel Dusk brought one substantial departure from Cing's earlier DS effort: they actually played a rather small part in the adventure. De-emphasizing the puzzles served to drive the game with its storytelling and sleuthing rather than the "find all objects in area, use to solve puzzle(s), move on to next room" formula that has been a staple of the adventure genre. In doing so it played right into the game's key strength, turning it from what could have been merely a passable experience into a very good one.
As much as we enjoyed the story, though, there was one thing I wish Cing had simply left out. We eventually came to call it "Quiz Time": nearly every chapter ends with Kyle standing in a hallway, introspecting, then suddenly saying "time to get my ducks in a row" or some variation thereof and plunging you into an end-of-chapter quiz on what you just played. You can really only fail if you were asleep (or in our case, because I misread one question in my haste to get the stupid thing out of the way). The only good thing about Quiz Time was that it provided an opportunity for one of us to get up and get drink refills while the other slogged through. I absolutely would not have missed the quizzes at all had they been simply excised.
It's no small coincidence the game is played holding the DS in the sideways "book" pose—this game is a story that you are playing through. And it's a good one, too; one you'll probably enjoy sinking your own eighteen hours or more into. I know we did—and a little later on, when I have the chance, I'll be taking another trip into the game to explore some of the tantalizing paths that we missed. Spending the time doesn't sound at all like a bad thing when it's as good a tale as Hotel Dusk.
I didn't know at first whether I could make it through the whole thing. You see, when the review copy arrived and I first fired it up, it took my wife and I a full ninety minutes to work through half of the first chapter. It wasn't that the puzzles were hard or the game system was difficult—in fact, folks who played Trace Memory will find themselves right at home with an only slightly-changed system—but that we were being fed what seemed at the time to be interminable amounts of text. And frankly, it was dull. The last thing we wanted was to listen to what seemed to be an endless parade of characters going on about pointless things.
Looking back on it now, however, I wonder if perhaps that initial feeling resulted from a stroke of storytelling genius on Cing's part. During the first part of the game, protagonist Kyle Hyde doesn't really seem like he cares either. Everyone's trying to talk his ear off or get him to help with some insignificant problem, and he's just got a job to do and a personal mission to fulfill. But by time that first chapter was done, Hyde (and, by extension, we) started to care. Through him, we were picking up on the trail of some intriguing mysteries, and we listened with rapt attention every time someone stopped Hyde in the hallway. or we tracked someone down to ask them some questions—hopefully bringing him closer to his personal goal of finding out what happened to his missing partner from his cop days.
In Hotel Dusk, you explore the hotel grounds by leading Hyde around on an overview map with your stylus, and when you approach a person or area of interest, icons light up allowing you to have a conversation or inspect the area, respectively. The former is the meat of the game, letting you hold text dialogues with just about anyone else you encounter. During these dialogues, Kyle will internalize questions that come up in response to things said. Many of these questions can be asked of the person he is currently talking to, while others that must be asked of someone else. Kyle will also, though much more rarely, get questions to ask from items he may find or puzzles solved while searching the game's environs.
The person Kyle is conversing with can also be interrupted at key points when an appropriate icon appears, allowing you to add your two cents from a couple of choices. You can opt not to interrupt if you wish, though we never did intentionally. Sometimes, asking the wrong question or saying the wrong thing can lead to a path being closed off to you, or even get you in such hot water that your game will end. Though the game does necessarily follow a largely linear path, the way characters reacted to your decisions lent the story a personal sense of attachment. While some dialogue choices were blatantly obvious (do we ask a meaningful question or just lob insults?), others had us sitting and scratching our heads for a moment to figure out how we should proceed, lest we lose an opportunity to get the information we needed.
Much attention has been paid to the artistry in the character headshots, and for good reason. Although it won't be long before you can pick out the somewhat limited repertoire of emotions each character has animations for—as the game is mostly dialogue-driven, you'll be staring at them a lot—they are all very well-animated and almost always add that extra bit of immersion to the story. The characters are even drawn slightly differently, if you look closely; the "hard-nosed" owner of the hotel, for example, is drawn with heavy, hard, dark strokes, while a mysterious young girl you'll meet is sketched with light, almost translucent stokes, giving her an ethereal quality.
With all that Cing got right telling the story, it almost felt like we were playing an entirely different game when the DS-centric puzzles came up. To their credit, none seemed contrived—they all fit as part of the story; to their detriment, many were implemented very poorly. One puzzle had us spending time in countless retries: the first time, I'd tried to move a particular item as far as I could, and the game registered that I'd "dropped" it—making a loud noise when I was supposed to be quiet, and ending the game. When given an opportunity to try again, I assumed I'd done something wrong; so I tried countless ways of doing it differently until, in exasperation, I simply tried the same thing again—this time succeeding. Another "puzzle" stumped us for some time simply because it was very poor at detecting what it was asking us to do. Not all puzzles were like this, thankfully; some were even rather clever and didn't have any technical problems—but the number that were simply frustrating to do properly, even when we knew what to do, was far too high.
With the puzzles being a somewhat-persistent thorn in our side, we were pleased to see that Hotel Dusk brought one substantial departure from Cing's earlier DS effort: they actually played a rather small part in the adventure. De-emphasizing the puzzles served to drive the game with its storytelling and sleuthing rather than the "find all objects in area, use to solve puzzle(s), move on to next room" formula that has been a staple of the adventure genre. In doing so it played right into the game's key strength, turning it from what could have been merely a passable experience into a very good one.
As much as we enjoyed the story, though, there was one thing I wish Cing had simply left out. We eventually came to call it "Quiz Time": nearly every chapter ends with Kyle standing in a hallway, introspecting, then suddenly saying "time to get my ducks in a row" or some variation thereof and plunging you into an end-of-chapter quiz on what you just played. You can really only fail if you were asleep (or in our case, because I misread one question in my haste to get the stupid thing out of the way). The only good thing about Quiz Time was that it provided an opportunity for one of us to get up and get drink refills while the other slogged through. I absolutely would not have missed the quizzes at all had they been simply excised.
It's no small coincidence the game is played holding the DS in the sideways "book" pose—this game is a story that you are playing through. And it's a good one, too; one you'll probably enjoy sinking your own eighteen hours or more into. I know we did—and a little later on, when I have the chance, I'll be taking another trip into the game to explore some of the tantalizing paths that we missed. Spending the time doesn't sound at all like a bad thing when it's as good a tale as Hotel Dusk.