Pharra

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Hotel Dusk: Room 215

I ran into the one thing that isn't good in Hotel Dusk for the Nintendo DS - wandering around not knowing who to talk to next. Admittedly, it's partly my fault, I came out of my room and heard someone whistle, like they just saw a dame, but saw no one. I walked up and down the hall and no one popped out of their rooms, so I went downstairs, found no one, and tried every door. Then I came upstairs and did the same thing until I found, at the end of the hall I started in, the utility room which hid the bellhop who was oogling a girly mag.

So next time the game drops me clues I'll be sure to, at the very least, stay on the same floor.

My suitcase key broke and I need some wire to unlock it; there's a lone coathanger in my room but it's the kind that's permanently attached to the hanger. There's a cute, asian/american mute girl downstairs and a prissy princess upstairs, the dour owner, the hard working, gossiping cook/cleaning lady, the bellhop who was a pick pocket I arrested several times back in New York, the lonely little girl who thinks she's going to find her mom and her paranoid father and the author who seems interested in... Room 215 perhaps?

As I've said before, you get two lines of questions and never get to go back to whichever one you didn't pick, so you can miss out on a lot of dialogue if you aren't carefully thinking "What do I not know, what should be implicit and I shouldn't waste time asking?"

The interesting thing about Hotel Dusk is twofold:

  1. I only partly get the feeling I'm playing the game, because I can't wander and do anything; the game gives me several options for each section of a chapter, but really I'm just reading what unfolds. Granted, how I converse with people affects how much I'm understanding the story.
  2. You can't role-play in this game - you are Kyle Hyde. I tried that, picking nicer answers, and I had to restart the game (to the point just after the intro) early on. You have to become the ex-cop/detective, and be willing to press on people when need be, or go easy.
Another minor quibble? I have this notepad in the game that Kyle stores all kinds of stuff in, as he seems obsessive compulsive about keeping notes; however, I only have 3 pages of "whatever I want to scribble with the NDS Stylus," which isn't much and fills up quickly. Somehow, keeping all of my notes in game seems appealing to me, as if I'm only fulfilling the game's design to make me part of it.