[1001] Hotel Dusk: Room 215

I’ve been embrac­ing the world of hand­helds, and am now in pos­ses­sion of a 3DS. Rather than play the lat­est and great­est 3D titles though, I’ve gone back through the 1001 and dug out a few weird sound­ing ones for the orig­i­nal DS (thank you back­wards com­pat­i­bil­ity).

And this one cer­tainly is a bit weird. It’s called:

1001 No.61: ‘Hotel Dusk: Room 215′ (DS, 2007)

It’s essen­tially a lit­tle mys­tery game. You’re some ex-cop, who works for a kind of pri­vate detec­tive agency that poses as a door-to-door sales com­pany. You appar­ently left the force because you shot your part­ner (Bradley) but are con­vinced he’s still alive and out there some­where. And for some rea­son you’ve ended up in some dead­beat hotel. So far so weird.

But it gets much weirder, in that the hotel is full of coin­ci­dences and char­ac­ters from your past, and the whole thing becomes one crazy mys­tery — with red her­rings, dead ends and twists all over the place. The actual game­play is pretty much made up of one main thing — dia­logue. To play, you hold the DS ver­ti­cally like a book, and it sure feels like one — con­ver­sa­tions seem to go on forever.

Be sure to be pay­ing atten­tion though — as an ex-cop, of course it’s pretty much your duty to go stick­ing your nose in all over the place, and so you do with great delight. What this means is that every now and then there’s a kind of inter­ro­ga­tion as each mini-mystery comes to a close, and if you ask the wrong thing or miss a vital clue — GAME OVER.

It’s got a great visual style, roto­scop­ing mak­ing it almost comic-book like — and has obvi­ously Japanese roots. But it’s been localised really well, and the dia­logue (although bloody lengthy) is well writ­ten and pretty engag­ing. I did actu­ally end up car­ing about the char­ac­ters, which shows they’re doing some­thing right.

It tries admirably to use some of the DS’s unique fea­tures, like the sty­lus etc, but it’s obvi­ously in the rel­a­tively early days of the DS. It’ll never win any ‘best game ever’ awards, but despite being a pretty lin­ear nar­ra­tive, with no real choices apart from the cor­rect ones, it’s good fun — and as always with things like this it’s just nice to see some­thing that’s a break from the norm.