Hotel Dusk: Room 215 (DS)
At Hotel Dusk, every room is given a name, but the one that truly draws the attention of guests is the one given to room 215: Wish. While the hotel itself isn’t that special, just another place on the side of the road near Los Angeles, the promise that staying in the room could make your wishes come true, even if you don’t know what they are, does make it appealing to people who know its story. For Kyle Hyde though, he couldn’t care less about the fairy tales, life beating down the ex-cop with the only hope he has driving him being the desperate belief the very act that made him quit the force might make sense to him one day. Perhaps he should put more stock in the myth of room 215 though, because in the point and click adventure Hotel Dusk: Room 215, far too many coincidences seemed to have followed him to the hotel on one fateful night.
3 years before the game’s events, Kyle learned his partner with the NYPD Bradley had gone from undercover to truly working with a criminal syndicate, and after Kyle shoots his escaping partner, no one was able to find Bradley’s body. Haunted by the lack of closure on Bradley’s motives and fate, Kyle leaves the force and gets a job as a salesman, but he can’t help but follow any little clue that might lead him to the answers he needs. Hotel Dusk seems like it will just be the latest stop in his lonely quest, but one of the guests has the same name as Bradley’s sister and a pickpocket Hyde knew from New York is now working there as bellhop. While the hotel’s fairly small, quickly Kyle learns that most everyone there has something to hide, far too many lining up with his own history for him to just sit back and spend the night resting in Room 215. As a result, the player will need to grill the staff and other guests, poke around for clues, and see if they can figure out the mystery behind the hotel without getting kicked out for prying too much.
More than anything, Hotel Dusk: Room 215 cares most about its story, and the writing comes through on keeping the player invested even if the early period of getting to know all the relevant characters can be a touch slow and uneventful. It’s vital staging for the web of relationships you’ll gradually uncover, but thankfully the cast has a good range of characters to keep things fresh and interesting. Louis, that pickpocket Hyde knew from a mutual past, actually quickly becomes your closest ally, both Kyle and Louis wanting to move on from being defined by their history. Kyle is a lot more jaded and gruff, at first quick to anger even when he speaks to the little girl staying at the hotel, but Louis works as a more comedic and amicable foil. Louis isn’t quick on the uptake and thinks he’s cooler than he is, but he’s a genuine guy as well. One of the better parts of how the two are written and many other characters is how clearly their unique voices come through. Kyle isn’t always straightforward when he speaks, sometimes using colorful phrasing to describe a situation almost like a classic noir detective, but Louis’s life on the street means he throws around more casual slang. Dunning Smith, the middle aged hotel owner, talks in a folksy way that offsets his brusquer moments. Inevitably, with this being a mystery story, some details and information are run through a few times, but Hotel Dusk: Room 215 keeps it from becoming stale mostly through characters phrasing it in new, unique, but still realistic ways.
Perhaps the strongest tool in its chest for really making its characters pop though is its choice of art style. Much of the time, characters in Hotel Dusk: Room 215 are rendered to look like black and white sketches, the lines always moving a touch to make them feel alive rather than static images. Despite looking like pencil sketches, they are very detailed, contours on the face showing well without the level of detail feeling overdone. Where it really shines though are when characters start to move or shift expression. Despite taking only a few motions to do something like hand you a key, a surprising amount of visual depth is achieved through how the body moves, people feeling literally less flat because of smart use of perspective and proportioning to make the sketches feel like they represent a full-bodied human being. What’s even more impactful though are the character expressions. When you see a genuine smile on Kyle’s face, it feels surprisingly warm because the art team has an excellent handle on how much to show and how to make it stand out from his usual appearance. A character like Rosa the maid seems like she could come off as standoffish with her initial somewhat angry expression, but then she opens up and smiles so brightly it’s hard not to be charmed. Iris, a socialite of some standing staying at the hotel, is made a more captivating mystery by the bemused curiosity you see on her face and a young man going by Jeff Angel immediately rubs you the wrong way with his natural but off-putting expressions that portray a brash young man who would be difficult to talk to. Even the little girl Melissa is absolutely adorable not because she was drawn to be excessively cute, but because when she looks happy, it feels so true to how a real person her age would show it.
A good degree of Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is just going to involve talking to the increasingly familiar faces of the hotel to follow the latest thread in a growing investigation. Not everything is tied to each other, this mostly grounded and realistic game perhaps realizing not everyone staying the night should tie directly to the same shady goings-on, but you still have elements to uncover in their tales too and some of them are a bit clever despite being diversions. After you have the full picture of the grander mystery some things might seem like pointless side stories in comparison, but they also primed you to start to think certain ways so that you can better connect the dots as you come across similar themes later down the line. The story can go on quite a while so whether or not such diversions were justified in the long run does make their value a touch questionable, and even when you know the full truth, it can feel like some things could have used stronger resolutions. The very slow text speed drags things out even more, text boxes not often able to hold three sentences and there’s no way to increase how fast the letters appear on screen. The plot can putter at certain points because of it, some stretches not sprinkling enough compelling breadcrumbs to keep you hooked until the ball really starts to get rolling in the last few chapters.
Most of your activities will involve finding people you need to speak to and asking them questions, Kyle handling most of the conversational work himself but there are times it’s up to you to pick the path the chat takes. Sometimes a character brings up a subject and you need to press them on it, two dialogue choices coming up where you need to figure out which one will hopefully lead to you learning something useful. However, there are also times where Kyle instead keeps the questions in his head for a while rather than immediately pursuing them, the player sometimes needing to figure out the proper order to asking those more crucial queries and even avoiding ones that potentially might rile up someone too much. There are Game Overs in Hotel Dusk: Room 215, saying the wrong thing to the wrong people leading to an investigative dead end or even potentially angering Dunning to the point he makes you leave the hotel for harassing him or his guests. You can easily go back to the point of error after to try again, but this does feel like the point where Hotel Dusk: Room 215 actually helps to make you more than a fairly passive observer of the story. You’ll need to be able to actually back up accusations at times with evidence too, but the Game Overs mostly being performative mean you can likely get through the story with persistence even if sometimes the game might make it a touch unclear what to do next when the answer is something like heading to the exact location necessary to trigger something you couldn’t have predicted like your pager beeping.
The ten chapters of Hotel Dusk: Room 215’s story, save for the last one, all conclude with a little quiz to help you get your thoughts in order and almost make sure you were paying attention, but there are more involved interactions than picking what to say and doing multiple choice recaps. Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is played by holding your Nintendo DS sideways, this allowing for larger portraits of the talking characters but the touch screen is also used quite extensively for interactions. While the characters are black and white sketches with occasional colored versions appearing, the world around you is actually rendered with 3D models. Exploring the hotel is done in first person, and while you can use the D-Pad, the game encourages you to drag your stylus across a map of the nearby area while watching the other screen to see what lies ahead. If you find a spot worth investigating you’ll move into a more detailed screen where you can start tapping objects to examine them or pick them up if they’re useful items, the touch controls not always feeling the most precise when the game wants you to tap something small like a pen and it instead keeps having Kyle talk about the desk it’s on instead.
At times though, the more interactive elements go beyond poking around for clues. Sometimes you’ll need to solve a puzzle, and Hotel Dusk: Room 215 has a mix of puzzles that are more novelties and ones that actually involve some thinking to complete. Something simple like a jigsaw puzzle isn’t really going to trip you up, but there are interactions that are almost riddles or even just a test to see how clever you can be with the DS’s various functions. After all, the system has more than a touchscreen, some interactions clearly just novelties but one of the few that feels outright flawed involves a cardboard box where a bookmark is stuck between the folds. You need to tap the box properly to make the bookmark slip out but you can’t really see your progress and all too easily can mess it up, something that was already guesswork made worse if you take the wrong actions. Thankfully other interactions like lockpicking are just a way to make the inventory use puzzle you already solved a touch more involved, and you are given a notebook to jot down important details in than can help with ones that require a bit more work than touch screen play. Besides information puzzles though you get fewer and fewer interactions beyond speaking as the story goes on. This was ultimately the right choice though, many of the touch screen puzzles not adding much with their presence, but they do technically keep this from being a full on visual novel at a time where that genre was a tougher sell, so their inclusion probably helped sneak this mystery story into game collections without any stigmas weighing it down.
THE VERDICT: Hotel Dusk: Room 215 constructs a strong mystery that it tells a bit too slowly, but it still has some strong hooks thanks to how well it ties to some likeable and realistic characters. The sketchy art style somehow gives them a believable human quality and each character has a distinct voice, so while it can sometimes feel like a glacial crawl, once things get moving you’ll be pulled in and invested in the outcome. Most of the interactions that aren’t grilling people like a detective do feel a touch like pointless gimmickry, some inventory puzzles and riddles fine but the touch screen and DS features get a bit too much focus for simple interactions.
And so, I give Hotel Dusk: Room 215 for Nintendo DS…
A GOOD rating. Speeding up the text display feels like it would shave literally hours off the runtime of Hotel Dusk: Room 215, it not obnoxiously slow but when the vertical orientation of the two screens means so little text can display, sometimes conversations inevitably last longer when there’s a lot of ground to cover. Beating the game actually unlocks faster text speed, and while there are a few minor differences in the second playthrough and possible alternate endings for things like getting no game overs at all, it still feels like a cheap way to get you to return to a game that should have been content with a good story well told instead. Hotel Dusk: Room 215 does have a great deal of intriguing reveals, the captivating cast having so many ties to each other making such narrative swerves hold more weight. The art really must be commended for doing its part in making each person come alive. A character like Dunning Smith could come off as quite gruff if you didn’t see his statements were often tied to a sort of resigned expression, his complaint coming from a weary man in a thankless job rather than a guy who gets irritable over little things. Seeing a character you’ve come to like here smile from their heart really feels impactful, especially since everyone at the Hotel Dusk seems to have something heavy weighing on them because of the secrets they keep. Some narrative diversions would probably be easier to accept if the game didn’t putter around at times like when you are just wandering around hoping to trigger a vital interaction, but the puzzles are a more contentious element. The ones that are more immersive or actually involve some problem solving feel justified, but that bookmark box is one that makes you resent their presence, and parts like a brief bowling minigame don’t explain the controls well so they demand more attention than such a brief aside deserves.
The back of Hotel Dusk: Room 215 calls it an interactive mystery novel, so in some ways, it asks for the same level of patience you might have reading a true book. Sometimes the author is laying vital groundwork even if they’re not doing it in the most interesting way, but keep reading on and you’ll get effective payoffs that make it worth the time investment. Hotel Dusk: Room 215 would admittedly probably be faster read as a book, but the visual presentation here does do wonders for making its characters come to life and there are puzzles or interrogations where playing your part as the detective is more engaging than just reading a guy solving it himself. While it’s easy to wish for a cleaner execution, people looking for a solid mystery will find Hotel Dusk: Room 215 carves out an well written tale worth investigating.