That said, the game’s “T” rating from the ESRB almost seems a little harsh. Arguably the most contrived thing about the game is that there could be such a collection of characters assembling all at once, each with their own convenient little secret.

There’s hardly anything but dry humor to be found, and aside from some very, very brief references to the wish-granting properties of Room 215, everything is kept wholly realistic. In sharp contrast to a lot of adventure games, Hotel Dusk is pretty serious. Considering Kyle personally shot Bradley, it’s very odd indeed that Mila happens to be wearing a bracelet just like the one Bradley used to wear. CharactersĪbsent but central to the plot, the discovery that Bradley was on the take during Kyle’s time at the NYPD continues to constantly haunt Kyle. In short order you are introduced to the hotel staff and Kyle’s fellow guests. It is another such assignment that leads Kyle to Hotel Dusk in the Nevada desert – but naturally things don’t quite go as planned. As the story opens, Kyle is ostensibly employed as a traveling salesman, but all is not as it appears: Red Crown, the company he works for, also has a side business of discretely “finding things” for people. The story is concerned with one Kyle Hyde, a former officer of the NYPD who resigned following an incident which resulted in the shooting of his partner, Brian Bradley. It was good of the developers to try, at least.) (There is a “second quest” available if you start the game over after finishing it once, but the only changes are very, very minor and you have to get through most of the game before anything different happens. On the one hand, this structure allows for the construction of a tidy, straightforward narrative, with each chapter ending in a dramatic confrontation of one of the characters on the other hand, the replay value is rather diminished, except for maybe exploring the various means of failing. However, there is almost always only one thing going on in the hotel at any given time: one place where anything is happening, and one place where you need to be. As you might expect from similar games, such as the Laura Bow mysteries, Cruise for a Corpse, or The Last Express, the clock automatically advances after key events. The story takes place over the course of ten chapters, each occurring over either a one-hour or half-hour period on an evening in December 1979. There’s no denying that Hotel Dusk is a very, very linear game. Fortunately, the story is sufficiently good, and so brilliantly presented, that it is hard to object to being led through it all by the nose. Hotel Dusk walks a very fine line between being an adventure game and being a straight-out read-through of a story. It’s a fair enough description, and not only in the sense that it is one of the rare DS games played with the console held sideways, book-style. Relatively hard to find upon its initial release, Hotel Dusk: Room 215 was eventually re-released by Nintendo under their “Touch Generations” label, with a giant orange banner plastered on the cover unambiguously labeling it “A MYSTERY NOVEL”.

Hotel dusk room 215 basement