I had initially left Hotel Dusk kind of confused after I first beat it. Not by its story, but by its reputation. Looking back on it, I think the reason for my confusion was a disconnect between what I had assumed people liked about Hotel Dusk and what actually makes the game good, its mystery and puzzles VS its characters and art.

Hotel Dusks puzzles are, as kindly described as possible, basic. They’re the same kind of puzzles I came up with when I was trying to make puzzle text adventures in middle school. They’re oftentimes disjointed from the world they exist in or boringly simple. While playing Hotel Dusk, I just felt confused why anyone would go out of their way to give praise to a game where the code to a safe is written down in a connect the dots puzzle trapped underneath the safe, or where the room where you need to put pencil shavings into an electrical socket also happens to have a book of life hacks that tells you to do exactly that.

And then, after having beaten the game and slowly moving into its sequel, it crept up on me that I did actually like this game. I liked it a lot, in fact. It’s the kind of story where when I lay in bed at night trying to get to sleep, I’ll keep running through specific scenes, through the parts the struck a chord within me. Fitting in with the game’s art style of pencil sketches and muted colors, none of its particularly flashy. Or at least, all of its flash is entirely surface level, the game pushing you past a story about million dollar art thefts, crime syndicates, and a double agent cop into empathy and understanding towards the people involved in all of that. You meet the artist behind the million dollar paintings and realize how little he values his own work, how much that price tag had ruined his life and taken away his joy of painting.

One of the most plot critical characters, and one who’s involved in what I consider to be one of the best scenes in the games, isn’t even ever shown. Despite the game starting off by setting up Kyles search for Bradley as his main motivation, you as the player never get to meet Bradley. He’s not at Hotel Dusk, at least not right now. As you stumble your way into more and more critical info about Bradley, about what he’s been doing and why, the game suddenly very plainly paints a picture of him for you. Him in a hospital room, watching over the daughter of the person who led to his sister being killed, realizing that the two girls share the same name. Having either already killed the father in an act of revenge or preparing to do. You don’t get to find out, you don’t even really get confirmation any of it ever happened. It’s all just assumptions, Kyle imagining things trying to make sense of what little info he has on his ex-partner.

And despite just now giving great credit to the character of Bradley and his lack of actual appearance in the story, the game’s other greatest strength is its showing of its characters, of everyone staying in Hotel Dusk. The way these people emote and move is so good it’s hard for me to articulate but I keep telling friends about it. Seeing these characters move the way they do paints them so effectively as real people it’s inspiring. Extensive effort went in to capturing every character’s most basic movements, how they put a hand through their hair or position themselves while shrugging. When I saw that this game’s sequel changed Kyles smiling sprite, I ended up rambling about it on cohost for 300+ words because of how perfectly I think this game capture his emotions in those frames.

There are still spots of Hotel Dusk that irritate me. I am still irked that a character won’t recognize his own ID until after you show him a newspaper article about his dad, or that you aren’t allowed to return lost items to someone because you’ve just found a pen on the ground that you’re expected to investigate instead. But I’m prone to forgetting these frustrations as time passes from me actually having played the game, instead my memory shifting more towards the story and characters that resonated with me so thoroughly.