A month or so back I finished up Hotel Dusk Room 215, a DS point-n-click slash visual novel by CiNG, who also made Another Code (which got remade for the Switch I believe?). I remember Hotel Dusk and Another Code coming out and thinking they sounded interesting in the reviews[1] but never gave them too much thought--they were probably coming out too close to games I Really Wanted and it was hard work to save up for a game and get someone to take me to a store for one[2]. Sometime, idk, last year, having installed unlaunch and dropping twilightmenu++ onto an SD, I asked the question, "what other games besides Rhythm Heaven hold the DS 'wrong'?" and Hotel Dusk came up.
Hotel Dusk. It's really good. Noir, lovely illustrations for the characters, excellent wobbly animation on the shading, great story, interesting use of the DS[3]--navigation is the main one but you also get to take notes and also there's a bowling minigame?--well developed characters all woven together (unbenownst to them!)... It's a treat. It ended quite well with no real loose ends for Kyle, but also I was like, "aw, I wanna hang out with this grump a little more". Thankfully, the EU and Japan got a sequel, and that's really what I started this post for.
Namely: it builds upon the summary and memory aid features of the first game in really neat ways! In HD, Kyle's got a notebook. It's where you save the game, but it's also got sections for each character (and what room they're staying in), a map of the hotel, summaries of each chapter, and a section where you can scribble notes to yourself (even during conversations!). Kyle will prompt you to note what time you should do certain things, but otherwise it's fair game for theories or tracking various sprawled puzzles. There is also a mechanic for the end of each chapter, where Kyle pauses to sort his thoughts on the events of the chapter via... a short quiz. It's a little hokey, but it's also so so so helpful. The game has a lot of threads, and it wants you to be able to remember them all and tie them together.
In Last Window, we get these features again, but with further expansions: the area of the notebook for your own notes has more pages and includes the ability to change your pen width (bold words/underlines! A smaller one to cram more info in!). Upon loading a save you're offered the option to check the summary or jump back into Kyle's shoes. The quizzes are still there to help review salient points. And then there's a marvelous meta Object: along with the summary there is also the novelization of the game. After you complete a chapter, you unlock a chapter[4]. It's more in-depth than the summaries, and written way more descriptively: it is the novel version of what you've done. Browsing it, it seems to even take into account some of your dialogue choices[5]. What really gets me, though, is the fact this book is authored by one of the guys you meet in Hotel Dusk. His arc involved plagiary, regret, and a promise of doing better... including writing a book about Kyle.
Last Window takes place a year after Hotel Dusk, in 1980[6]. The book's dust jacket notes the author disappeared for a while and then came back full force in the 90s. Your bookmark for the novel is also the very same bookmark you hand the author in HD: there's a quiet little meta-narrative here where Kyle is sent a copy of the book the author promised, and now we're experiencing the book via Kyle's memories of the events.
This is a) fun storytelling and b) neat mechanically. I love methods of recall and memory, and I appreciate how Last Window and Hotel Dusk go great lengths to acknowledge they have complex plots and the player is going to be picking up and putting down their DS. It makes the mystery all the more engaging when the developers so clearly are with the player going, "yeah, we want you to solve this mystery, and remember it". They're sticky cuz the writing and characterization and animation is excellent, but they're also sticky because they're giving the player tools to remember. I like 'em.
in Nintendo Power; I may have seen some forum chatter too but at the time NP really was my nearly-only video games newssource ↩︎
plus: 2007, when Hotel Dusk was released, was uh. A Dark Year for my family ↩︎
not once but twice does it use my favorite mechanical puzzle solution. Twice may be too much for it to feel like the mean trick it is, but that's actually a really good thing--it introduces it as a possible solution, which makes it Make Sense to do later on in a scenario with much higher stakes and a (at least implied) timed situation: You first close the DS to flip a child's puzzle out of its cardboard frame while keeping it intact; you later use it as a way to bring Kyle's character portrait on one screen onto another character's portrait on the opposite screen to perform mouth to mouth resuscitation. ↩︎
or maybe faster? I've only gotten a little into chapter two and found this Feature ↩︎
for the record, in HD there was no real branching paths from these. At most it was a way to get a game over if you were too mean to the kid at the hotel or asked the wrong questions and failed to get someone to open up about whatever they're hiding. No idea if this one has branched endings or not, but in HD the "multiple endings" mentioned online are more like just a smidgeon more development and mostly based on whether or not you got any gameovers ↩︎
sidenote: there is a puzzle in HD that involves fixing a cassette tape that has been yanked out of its housing. You have to find a pencil to engage the gears and wind it back up. That suddenly becomes a difficult puzzle--even possibly unsolveable without aid--for certain people due to their age. That delights me. ↩︎