Hotel Dusk: Room 215 Review

SOOO, Tsuki is BACK AGAIN for another CAPS-filled review, ON ANOTHER DS GAME! :D Hotel Dusk: Room 215! This is a personal favorite~

Okay, little crappy summary: You play as an ex-cop named Kyle Hyde and the whole game takes place at an old hotel called Hotel Dusk. As an ex-cop, Hyde is a person who digs into things, SO OF COURSE THIS IS A MYSTERY GAME! YAAAY! He’s looking for his old buddy who went missing, and this is the SPECIAL PLACE WHERE WISHES COME TRUE! (There is some amount of truth in that, but you’ll have to play it to get what I mean. :D)

The gameplay, some of it I described earlier, is pretty simple…yet somewhat a little more complicated than simple. VERY DESCRIPTIVE, YES I KNOW. JUST LET ME EXPLAIN. You walk, you talk, you use the menu, you have a notebook, you use items, you can examine stuff, blah blah blah. You can do more or less of this stuff with buttons, but most of the game is touch screen. Hotel Dusk is kind of an intellectual game, with some puzzles and stuff. You pretty much just do whatever the game tells you to do, using your common sense. You have to apply tools and other items to your surroundings to do certain things and…well you get the idea. This is also a game where some choices or actions can change what happens, but it’s all just ‘do this and you move on’, ‘do that and you game over’, ‘do this wrong and you game over’. Taking too long to do something could also get you kicked out of the hotel. There are a few different endings, but all I know is BAD ENDING, NORMAL ENDING, NORMAL ENDING PLUS THIS, NORMAL ENDING PLUS THIS PLUS THAT, even though I’ve played this quite a few times. :P And the bad ending is just getting kicked out, by the way (except for OOONNNE part of the game where you can actually die). And still remember that this information on endings is just based on my own experience. Ahem, so, like I said, choices affect stuff. Hyde is nosy and asks people all these personal questions and this leads to him wanting to know more about people, then ‘boss interrogation, press for the truth’ things. Doings things wrong in those means bad bad, and saying the wrong things even before those means bad bad too. This is a game where it’s good to SAVE. A. LOT. And you get 3 save slots; USE ALL OF THEM. You never know when you did something wrong and have to go back to a past save, yeah?

I looove the storyline to this game. I mean, everyone may think it’s bland and stuff, but it’s the thing that leads to this DEEP GAME OF MYSTERIES AND SUSPENSE. Okay, the amount of suspense depends on you, but I really get feeling when I interact with fiction so. . . But ANYWAYS, I love the kinds of games where EVERYTHING is connected and the mist just gradually lifts from those bonds and then you’re like “OOOOOH THEY’RE RELATED :OOO”; yeah, THIS IS ONE OF THOSE GAMES! 8D (More or less exaggeration on the reaction to the connections, but you know me, HYPERBOLE! That rhymed, I love rhymes. BD And emoticons ;D)

AHEM, so, not much of the 100%ing stuff. I mean, you got the different endings, make sure you do stuff right, you could pick every combination of choices in a conversation to see what each one leads to if you want, but that’ll take forever so GOOD LUCK. And…there’s also this side thing where you have to find numbers on small pieces of paper that are posted on stuff around the hotel. (I was never able to complete this, WAAAHHH T~T) You do stuff with those numbers and another thing and some other things (if you play Hotel Dusk, hint: vending machine) and if you complete it, you get a certain item. You get to use this item later. So there are a few secret stuff…maybe that’s more than the “not so much” that I said earlier. :/

CHARACTERS! There are multiple characters, of course, since this is a hotel. But actually, this is a pretty crappy hotel so I’m surprised at how many people were there. …Oh but there are reasons for that. Hem hem, ANYWAYS, EVERY character has a backstory! YAAAY! (Well, except for like…two? But they’re not super involved characters.) And this is the ‘EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED! :OOOOO’ thing, cough cough. :D The characters all have their own distinct personality and stuff. There’s an old grump, the naggy super maid, a lazy bum, an average father, a bratty little girl, an insolent teenager, a chatterbox that for some reason has a British accent in my head, a nice old lady, a…just plain lady, blah blah blah. MY FAVORITE, is the main character, Kyle Hyde! :D He’s nosy, sort of rude/meanish (not sure how to describe it), casual, doesn’t care what people think, but he’s still a nice guy~ x3 His hard attitude kind of annoyed me before and I was like “ugh, I don’t like you” but then I started to LOVE him! XD His personality makes things funny sometimes, and his behavior makes him convincing. :3 You just gotta love Hyde~ Oooh, rambles rambles.

Graphics and sound… Well, the scenery is pretty realistic and colored and everything while the characters are black and white and have a sketch-like design. They actually move in their expressions and when they’re talking and stuff too. :D There aren’t really any cutscenes…but whatever! The sound is nice, too. There are small sound effects for like, opening/closing doors, knocking, walking, papers, phone, etc. No voices at all :/ Though I really like the music! Some of it is kind of jazzy and some are suspense, some are calming, some are just casual and nice to fit the area you’re in, yadda yadda, and I think they’re all enjoyable.

A couple things bugged me, though. JUST A COUPLE. This first thing wasn’t really annoying but it just made me think. It’s that the super maid who does all the cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc. is FAT. She’s the only one of the 3 employees that does any work and she’s fat. :P HMMMM. The other thing was that the text moves too slow. -_- I mean, it didn’t bother me at first, but y’know when you go back to saves and have to read things over again you’re just like “GET ON WITH IT, I READ THIS ALREADY”, and I also played Hotel Dusk multiple times so…you get it. ALSO, with all this mystery and backstories and stuff, I just happened to notice…that SIX PEOPLE HAVE DISAPPEARED. XD So I was just like “haha that’s a lot of missing people to hear about in one hotel,” y’know?

OVERALLNESS! I did say that this a personal favorite! I. LOVE. THIS. GAME. There’s also a sequel called Last Window: The Secret of Cape West that I need to get to. *soul starts bouncing around inside me* 8D So ja, I love mystery, I love stuff that connects, I love Kyle Hyde, I love the gameplay, I just plain love this game~ (as I said) x3 You may think this rating is a bit generous, but WHAT DO I CARE? I THINK IT’S A STELLAR GAME! 9.5/10 for Hotel Dusk~!