Not a big puzzle game guy, but I really enjoyed this game. The style is insanely good, it's what got me to play the game in the first place. Story was good, felt satisfying to progress and the mysteries in each chapter were intriguing. All of the characters were charming, they were all unique and the interactions between them and Hyde gave me a good chuckle a few times. The puzzles though were only just fine, aside from 2 none of them really stood out to me, but I think it's fine, the puzzles weren't really the focus anyways.

One thing I'll admit: I included this game on a list of introductory adventure games without having completed it myself. That's my confession, and I really do feel like I should've got to this earlier.

We start the game with snapshots of the big city, but soon we are off to a tiny hotel in the desert of Nevada. A blank slate, a desert, or so it seems. Can we start over? Only after discovering our past once again.

I was so awe struck by this game. I ate it up, which is surprising because I'm in a slump with games right now. I admit, the puzzles did get tedious, one or two in particular (finding a tiny piece of chalk that I needed to make a pen legible). There's one other particularly annoying one that I forgot.

This is one of the most visually striking games on the DS. The book "1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die" (a mouthful) describes it as being like the video to A-ha's "Take on Me", a comparison I cannot un-see. Yet it really works in the games favor. It's interesting, it's symbolic almost, to see the characters in monochrome, as if they are all stuck in the dark, toiling away until the end, but with hope of color.

Kyle is an interesting protagonist. He starts the game off as kind of a gruff a-hole. Yet, his dialogue is really well written, and he ends up being a very lovable protag. He "softens" up a little as the game goes on, and we get to love him in his cynicism yet real kindness when he is put to the test by peoples desperation. It's like watching someone grow empathy.

The music is amazing, also some T's Music people worked on this game (another game to add to the Reel Fishing legacy, if you know you know.)

The dialogue can be funny as hell, I'll leave you to experience it if you haven't already. Very witty and well written.
Also, I feel like they really captured the vibe of 70s America.

Sorry for this kind of skimmed review, I promise I will eventually play this again and say my thoughts in more detail.
Trust this tired reviewer, this game made me cry, and it's intensely real and personal. Give it a shot.

(My time with this game was about 11 hours 50 minutes, but since I admittedly used a walkthrough at parts, the realistic time would be around 13 hours I think.)

On an aesthetic and tonal standpoint, this game completely oozes of style and does a very unique take on Noir style with its pencil drawn art style. The music also compliments the tone and aesthetic of the game perfectly, really giving off that 60s era America vibe. Everything about the presentation of this game is super experimental, even the way you hold the DS to play is fitting for a detective game. Cing really nailed it here.

I also really liked how every plotline in this is connected and have a very strong theme of betrayal and dreams. Makes the story feel surprisingly cohesive despite the game basically having a "victim of the week" formula with its chapters.

I kinda wish there was a thing that told you where to go half of the time. I was kind of stumbling on where to go a lot of time and committed to a lot of trial and error unless the game outright told me where to go. Puzzles can also be very brutal at times, but the puzzles that really utilized the DS's capabilities were genuinely really cool.

So yeah really cool and experimental DS game that has me super curious in checking out Last Window next.

thought it was about time to get back to this since it has been a few years. this was playthrough number six but it was my first time seeing the extra content involving the ending that comes with a new game+ file.

still one of my biggest favorites. the use of the DS and all of its features is among the best from anybody. it got a bit slept on at the time but i feel like if this came even a few years later and saw a port to PC/Steam it could've found a larger audience. Cing deserved the world.

probably the best soundtrack in the medium.

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.

One of many visual novel detective DS games to play around Christmas time. Or after, since it takes place right after it.
Amazing dialogue and story telling, the puzzles are centered around the DS mechanics so while it might be tricky to emulate, if you have a DS it's a real treat. The music here is wonderful and the art style is unique, like it's coming out of the imagination of someone reading a noir mystery novel. While it can get a bit repetitive at times, from going to the phone, to questioning, to investigating, it makes up for the various dialogue trees. Hell, you can get a game over depending on if you show the piece of evidence to the wrong person. Please play it, hell get an actual DS to play it. It'll be worth it.

Hotel Dusk has a bunch of stuff to love.

The music is continuous bliss, the film noir visuals are stunning from start to finish, and the story, and the writing that accompanies it, feels connected like nothing else I've ever read. Seriously, I'd love to see if there was some kind of visual guide they created while coming up with this story, because the web that it creates by the end is mind-blowing. While only a few puzzles impress, namely the ones that require more than a button press, and the game sometime requires some ridiculously random things, like making sure you check everywhere evidence isn't before an NPC will talk to you, Hotel Dusk is still a game that I found myself loving while playing, and loving even more when I thought about it later.

9/10
Game #6 of 2024, January 21st