11/25/2023 0 Comments Hotel dusk room 215 logo![]() ![]() Opposite my distaste for obtuse puzzles and non-investigation, I am happy to report that the story and the dialogue are better handled. And what about that plot? One of the many bizarre game over dialogues. This is a visual novel! It’s all about the plot! ![]() Puzzles are either incomprehensible or patronizing.īut Piyoz, I hear. All the while, there is either no communication to the player or the player’s hand is held every single step of the way. So many puzzles require you to find some tool in some box in some room of the hotel. These are four essential pieces of information to complete this task and the game indicates zero of them. The game failed to communicate 1) that my next task was to discover the inscription on the pen, 2) that it could be filled it with chalk or flour, 3) there is chalk and flour available for use and 4) that they could be used to fill in the missing letters. Apparently I had to find either chalk or flour, rub the material into the pen and fill in the inscription of a name. I wandered around for thirty minutes trying to find something to do with it. For example, Kyle Hyde gets his hands on a fountain pen at one point. At several points, I acquired some kind of new item or tool during an interaction and was left with no real clues as to how to use it or what I was supposed to accomplish with it. I’ll finish your damn puzzle when I finish it! That’s no excuse for such banal and pointless minigames sprinkled across the entire experience. I understand that this is a visual novel at its core. Heck, there’s a bowling section that manages to be tiresome. With those quotation marks, I mean to point out the odd difference between legitimate investigative methods that you might expect from a former inner city detective and the tedious busywork that Hyde occupies himself with. This discomfort grows as the actual “investigation” begins. Moving about, interacting, investigating and advancing through dialogues feels clunky and imprecise. Using a stylus, the player moves Hyde around on the touchscreen while the other screen shows a first person perspective of hallways and offices. This way, the standard screen on the left and the touchscreen on the right present a very vertical experience. The first thing to point out is that for this game the DS is meant to be held on its side, as though you were holding an open book (It’s a visual novel…get it?). As the game opens in December 1979, he comes upon a modest and dusty hotel in the Nevada desert, the eponymous Hotel Dusk. Now living as a salesman for a small company called Red Crown, Hyde travels across the USA for work. Hotel Dusk Room 215 tells the story of former NYPD detective Kyle Hyde in the years after his harsh departure from the force. I took advantage of the semi-miracle and gave the little game a go during my daily hour-long cross-city commute. Then, years later, I found it in a local game retailer’s discount bin. I, like many, learned of Hotel Dusk from a Brawl trophy. This underground DS point-and-click mystery visual novel may not be a standout inclusion in many people’s handheld collections, but at least it has something of a reputation in online Nintendo circles as being an obscure needle-in-the-haystack from the shovelware-ridden years of the Wii and DS era. 2007’s Hotel Dusk Room 215 was published by Nintendo and developed by the former Cing. ![]()
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