Oh boy, the Nintendo DS. I reviewed some Wii games on Hidden Gems, but I have yet to review a DS game. And let me tell you, if the Nintendo Wii is the king of shovelware games, than the Nintendo DS is at least the sultin. DS shovelware was bad, but we all know it never got to the levels of Ninjabread Man bad. But man, finding underrated DS games is way harder than Wii titles. With Wii, Ты can at least pick out the good hidden gems from the bad ones. With DS, it’s not so easy. Ты could find one with a decent box art only to be hit with a poorly made game. But thankfully, we’ll be talking about one of the better titles in gaming, and that would be the mystery point and click game, Hotel Dusk: Room 215



Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is a game that was published by Nintendo, a company Ты may или may know, but was actually developed by Cing, a Japanese company known for making Little King Story and…. Nothing else. And even Little King Story isn’t that recognizable. Hotel Dusk follows Kyle Hyde, an ex New York cop who became a salesman for the Red Crown company, yet is still on the hunt for his partner, Brian Bradley, who went rogue and disappeared during a case involving stolen art pieces three years ago. He is told by his boss, Ed Vincent, to head to the Hotel Dusk in Nevada, run by Dunning Smith, a man with far too many secrets. Inside the hotel, Kyle runs into other characters, like Louis DeNonno, a man who works at Hotel Dusk and was once a pickpocket in New York that Kyle busted a few times. Rosa Fox, the no nonsense cleaning lady. Melissa Woodward, a little kid and her father, Kevin, who are looking for her mother and his wife. Martin Summer, a book Автор who only had one good book. Helen Parker, an elderly woman with an eyepatch. Iris, a full-of-herself actress. Jeff Damon, a punk who likes causing trouble. And Mila, a mysterious young girl who can’t speak. Kyle takes Room 215, a room that is сказал(-а) to grant the wishes of the person who stays in there, and with that, Kyle Hyde does what he can to find out the secret that this hotel holds and tries to find out what the characters are hiding and what happened to Bradley, while also getting involved in the Поиск of a mysterious Энджел painting and the painter who is just as mysterious. Yeah, this is one of those kinds of complex mystery stories.



One of the major gimmicks of Hotel Dusk is not the gameplay, but rather, how Ты hold the DS. Ты have to hold it sideways, like a book, and read it and play it like that. It could look weird and could even play like garbage, but it works pretty well. The controls are swapped so that it plays just right. Pressing left on the control makes Kyle go down when Ты hold the DS the right way. Now, this could just be my fault, but when I hold the game, it has an awkward feel when I hold it with one hand. That could just be because I played this game on a 3DS XL rather than the intended DS, but whatever. That didn’t кислый the experience for me. The game doesn’t have much gameplay going for it, but for mystery games, I think that’s fine. Ace Attorney doesn’t have much gameplay, and that game is still going strong to this day. Some of them Япония is too selfish to let America play. But, regardless, the gameplay is pretty simple. Ты walk from one room to another, trying to solve clues или find a person to talk to. Sometimes, it can be interesting, when Ты have an item and Ты use your thinking to solve it. Other times… It can be a little tedious, with cryptic information или having Ты do stuff Ты don’t care about, like Чтение wine labels. Yes, really! But to be fair, there are times when Ты can pay for failing to do something correctly. If Ты try to discuss a certain topic that a character doesn’t wanna talk about, Ты could get a game over. Now, I don’t know what happens from that point, because, as much as I don’t wanna toot my own horn, I didn’t get a game over once in this game, so I can’t rightfully say what happens. The game can be a bit of trial and error, and I can see that, but I never found this game to lead Ты into a trap falsely. I felt like characters always gave Ты subtle yet easy to spot hints and if Ты get caught или talk about a subject too much when Ты are дана a warning not to, that’s the players own fault, rather than the games, and I think that works in the games favor.



But the game isn’t all about walking back and forth as Ты try to talk to one character and Переместить on to the next. It also has puzzles, and each and every one of them utilize the DS touch screen for Ты to solve them. Some puzzles are pretty… meh. They really just arrange to set this item here или Переместить this item there. But there are in fact some puzzles that stand out, like connecting the dots to create the numbers to a lock combination, trying to find all the letters on apples and arranging the letters based on how many apples there were in order. It’s puzzles like that that really stand out. One of my избранное are when Ты have to close the DS and open it up to find the solution, like finding a hidden message on the back of a puzzle set или when Ты have to wake Mila up with CPR. Stuff like that. It reminds me of the time I didn’t know how to solve a puzzle in Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, so I handed the DS to my brother, and when he opened it, that was the puzzle. I felt so smart… My brother thought I was an idiot, though. Regardless, the puzzles in Hotel Dusk are pretty good, and they make Ты feel like Ты really had to think hard to get through them… или Ты could just look up a walkthrough. Because that also helps.



A common complaint that I’ve seen about Hotel Dusk is that the game feels like it keeps Ты on a track, Ты are never allowed to explore, and it makes it feel just bland and uninteresting. I disagree completely. Well, the uninteresting part, anyway. I can see some people getting bored with Hotel Dusk. But I just found the characters to be far too interesting for me to consider the setting of the Hotel too uninteresting. These characters, every single one, have something to hide, and Ты can’t just expect them to spill the beans once Ты meet them. After all, Ты just met them, and they’re not about to tell their deepest secret to Hyde. So naturally, Ты gotta get it out of them, and each one can be quite shocking. Martin Summer’s story of betrayal will just make Ты see what kind of person he really is. Helen’s is one that will break you. And then there’s the story of Mila. или man, poor Mila. No one got it worse off than her. When Ты have the information, and yet the characters still continue to deny your claims, your only way to prove them wrong is through deductive reasoning and evidence. And then the Музыка kicks in, letting Ты know that Ты have them cornered and the best thing for Ты now is to Показать them the evidence that will get them talking. It’s the kind of feeling I get in Ace Attorney that I feel in this kind of game as well, and it just makes me interested in it more. Mystery games aren’t fondly respected simply for it’s gameplay, it’s the story and the characters, and the story and characters of Hotel Dusk are perfect.



~Ending~

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Actually, no. If I were to spoil the ending of a mystery game, that would be a completely dirtbag thing to do. So yeah, I won’t say a word. I’ll just say that if Ты were invested in the story before, the final chapter of Hotel Dusk will have Ты constantly Чтение over the truths that are revealed and listen to the characters every word as the truth is laid out in plain sight. Also, I will stop having the ending segment on Hidden Gems. I honestly don’t know why I had it here in the first place. I will be ceasing the ending section of Hidden Gems unless the ending или the final boss is something to discuss. Just letting Ты all know that.

~Legacy~

Cing was a company that nobody knew too well unless Ты were in the very small group of Hotel Dusk fans. But there was another game, a sequel to Hotel Dusk, called Last Window: The Secret of Cape West, that continued the story as Kyle Hyde had to Поиск for a mysterious Scarlet звезда while searching the residents of his apartment, and was сказал(-а) to have еще improvements and an even better story than Hotel Dusk. Well boy, let’s see how Cing felt about these improvements……… Oh. On March 1st, 2010, Cing filed for bankruptcy and closed down that year. Last Window was the last game that the company released and being so close to their closure, the game never saw a North American release, yet was released in Япония and Europe. Because the 3DS has no problems with playing DS games that are from other countries, a UK copy could work. If Jump Super Stars, a game I can’t even fucking read on my 3DS works, than so can a game with English text. Sadly, the game goes for outrageous prices online, so… yeah, I may have the tech, but I don’t have the cash. But hey… At least we got Kyle Hyde in Smash Bros. Brawl… as a trophy… The first animated trophy, anyway… Yeah, Hotel Dusk is dead, and so is Kyle Hyde.



~Verdict~

Hotel Dusk: Room 215 may be one of the еще obscure games on this list, minus the small following it has from dedicated fans. And I am indeed happy to say that I am now a part of that fandom. Hotel Dusk was a game that kept me going through it’s ten chapters with interesting plot and characters and kept me invested all the way through, wanting to solve the puzzles and find out the truth of what happened. We will never see a return of this franchise, I guarantee that, but we can at least enjoy the two titles we have with us (One, for us North Americans), and appreciate the amazing plot that this game had. And with that being said, I give Hotel Dusk: Room 215 the rank of Hidden Gem. Excavation Worthy if Ты are еще on the gameplay side.