This one is a bit hard for me to rate. It wasn't a bad game. It's a psychedelic experience, like walking into a surrealism painting. Personally not my go-to genre but someone else might love it. The atmosphere and design is memorable in a bizarre dream-like trip.

There's a story to uncover as you explore the hotel and speak with odd NCPs. You can eavesdrop and assist them in return for items. They will also give you backstory to better understand the setting and important characters. It plays like an adventure game.

Norwood Suite is a labyrinth - both in the literal layout of the Norwood Hotel, and figuratively with the mysterious Peter Norwood and all the people who would find themselves wrapped up in his vexing legacy.

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I think the phrase I have an impulse to use when it comes to Cosmo D’s games would be “clown politics” - there is a zany, unhinged feeling to the world of Off-Peak but it is a complex world, with many forces and interests intermingling and meshing in a complicated and nuanced fashion.

The bedrock, the backbone of these politics is of course always music, much in the same way the backbone of the game is always its sound direction. When music is history, and when music is science, it makes sense that the most prominent members of this society happen to be musicians - and this is demonstrated most prominently by Peter Norwood, eccentric virtuoso and mythological figure, leaving behind the equally bizarre and affluent Norwood Hotel.

And what a bizarre estate it is. It is at once a sprawling mansion of peculiar layout. At the second, it was a creative studio housing many different artists, and as a creative space it was also a gallery of eclectic inspiration. Later, it is a reclaimed space converted into a hotel on something of a historical site because: finally, the Norwood Estate is a puzzle left by the “late” Peter Norwood, who disappeared abruptly without a trace, and much like its mysterious owner the Hotel is full of secret passages and bind-bending spaces.

And Norwoods not the only one.

The staff of Norwood Hotel must contend in a real estate battle with the industrious Modulo company on one front. On the other side, they must continue to court the musical sensation of DJ Bogart and his sponsor Blue Moose Energy Drinks. Caught in the middle are academics on field trip from colleges in the city, traveling bands grappling with their burgeoning fame, and of course the ghosts of Norwoods Ensemble. All while you, John Stranger, are here on a covert mission from… The Circus.

If that sounds a lil bit like gibberish, thats because it partly is: but every character in Norwood Suite is a highly motivated agent and its actually incredibly surprising that this was someones first serious game. This is better level design and better character design than some premiere game releases that have come out even this year.

In any other context, “clown politics” would sound like an insult but I think its my new favorite genre.

The more Cosmo D games I play, the more they enchant me. It's like experiencing an interactive series of vignettes, each with an associated rhythm. Everything is lathered in an overtly cartoony surrealism that helps create a fantastical environment. Yet this is all juxtaposed with the often mundane and rather realistic dialog of the characters. And despite everything being vignette-esque, there's always a core objective and history that wraps the whole experience together. Very cool, very weird, please keep making more experiences Cosmo D!

Há algo de magnético dos jogos de Cosmo D: através dos verbos básicos do point and click, ele nos guia por anedotas e paisagens que mesclam o sônico, o visual e o texto de maneiras surreais e inesquecíveis - cada cômodo novo, cada conversa com um de seus personagens; um novo cenário delirioso gravado diretamente em vinil no hipocampo. E não ignoro as partes individuais do arranjo: trilha sonora e texto, especialmente, já brilham sozinhos.

Norwood Suite é menos ambicioso do que Tales From Off-Peak, e tecnicamente deixa um pouco a desejar - especialmente com bugs e clipping no terreno. Ainda assim, é uma experiência charmosa que não descarto.

The Norwood Suite is the spiritual sequel to Cosmo D's Off-Peak, that short exploration game in a weird train station. This one's about exploring a weird hotel that was once famous for housing a legendary jazz musician that mysteriously vanished. The hotel has since become a sort of Graceland, but also the home performance venue for this up-and-coming DJ of that there Electronic Dance Music what the teenagers like. Also, a big corporation is looking to buy the hotel and turn it into a server farm.

The mechanics are straightforward. You listen to people to find out what they want, then you go looking around the hotel and occasionally perform simple tasks to get the items those people need, then they'll reward you with items you can use to unlock more areas and maybe find other items that other people need, and so on and so forth.

Like with Off-Peak, it's all about navigating a surreal world, interacting with strange characters, and hearing cool music.

For all the aesthetic weirdness in the game, the writing is relatively easy to follow, with a cast of characters that have relatable concerns and major plot threads that held my interest for the 2 and a half hours it took to finish the game. The stories don't exactly have neat conclusions, but I appreciate the very human approach the game takes regarding the overarching conflict of art and commercialism. As a "writer" in marketing who still takes the time to exercise my critical and creative muscles off the clock for my own personal satisfaction, I feel the struggle some of the characters go through.

A little thing I also like is how each character has a distinct musical flourish that acts as voice lines for their dialogue, not totally unlike the distortion filter over the voices of Killer7 NPCs. It does a lot to breathe life into the expressionless animatronic-like character models! Not surprised to find out from reading interviews with Cosmo D that he was hyper-specific about which instrument to use for each character.

While the Norwood Suite is more coherent and less of an art piece than Off-Peak, I do think it's had less of a visceral impact on me. That's not too surprising, because it's still in the same style as Off-Peak, so in a way it's also familiar whereas Off-Peak was completely alien to me. The biggest step forward is that the world doesn't feel static, as characters move around and interact with other characters as you make progress, but overall it does feel iterative.

If you aren't into walking sim type games this game isn't for you. The gameplay itself isn't very engaging, at most being boiled down to "Talk to person find object, place object somewhere else, walk". But the gameplay isnt what this game is made for.

The art is brilliant, it's mix of surreal, dadaist, and almost dr seuss like environments with the almost sinister and unsettling undertones makes the game a bizarre & beautiful mess. And I use mess in a good way. And the story, all biet hard to understand if you haven't played the other games (made a bit worse with the fact that there isn't really a set order to play them in), is very mysterious and fun to unravel. The armosphere is well made and does a good job at pulling you into this weird world Cosmo D has made. Especially with its amazing soundtracks that stands as one of my favorite OST's in gaming.

If your the type to play a game like firewatch, gone home, or Kentucky Route Zero, or just have a taste for the strange and bizzarely beautiful, this game is a must play.

The Norwood Suite brought me new discoveries with every room. With his free-to-play 2015 release, Off-Peak, NYC musician and developer Cosmo D brought his electric, off-the-cuff style of jazz to game space. That energy is focused and brought to life in new ways in The Norwood Suite, one of the best first-person experience games(walking sim, if you prefer) since 2015's The Beginner's Guide. Strictly speaking, you progress through the game by performing menial tasks for the clientele and staff at The Norwood Suite, a demented hotel tucked among the evergreens in the rural sprawl around NYC. But the game’s charm lies in the setting and characters, a storied hotel with intrigue, Dadaist absurdity, and architecture that gleefully folds in on itself. The story goes...places, but it's the music that will constantly nip at your heels (literally, the music always manifests in the world through speakers peppering the estate), guiding you from hall to hall in a world where internet modems have eyes, voices are interpreted as freeform instrumentals, and Red Bull has taken over the world. It's the best world to get lost in, where musical and visual discovery await at every turn.

Assim como "Off-Peak" e "Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1", que pude jogar anteriormente, The Norwood Suite é uma experiência muito mais que um game.
Nas palavras do próprio Cosmo D:
"The Norwood Suite is a much more involved game, in terms of its mechanics, its systems, and the way you interact with people." O surrealismo comum das obras do desenvolvedor está afinado como sempre, mas a narrativa é muito melhor e mais envolvendo que em "Off-Peak". É clara a evolução do desenvolvedor nos dois anos entre os games.
É o tipo de obra para se sentir, não entender, e é aí que mora o brilho. Grande parte dos jogos, filmes, séries e livros fazem questão de explicar tudo com a maior quantidade possível de detalhes e deixam poucas questões abertas para a interpretação do público. Cosmo D faz o oposto, como se dissesse "entende o que quiser aí, maluco, eu fiz a minha parte".
Essa é a magia deste desenvolvedor que não cria jogos, mas sim sonhos tangíveis.

You know, this might be the only game I've played that's absurdist not only through its narrative, its world and somewhat whacky environment, but on the meta level of looking like a random free Unity game featuring an amalgam of random assets. And that really does help make the absurdism feel authentic. And honestly? Lots of games can learn from this. From the pointed dialogue, the not-too-crazy but still crazy sections that horror games try and fail to emulate, and the use of music. You wouldn't expect it, but this has an incredibly distinct style, and I hope to see more of it.

Outstanding as a showcase for Cosmo D's musical talents, ineffectual in every other regard. The Norwood Suite represents a turning point for Cosmo D's oeuvre towards commercialisation and an acceptability for the gaming masses. The wide-open amorphous slapdash spaces of Off-Peak have been cast aside in favour of regimented, interconnected spaces which ultimately refuse the possibility of wasted time and effort on the part of the player. That isn't to say that earning money for your labour is bad. Rather, there is a sense of sterility in presentation and experience.

Though Off-Peak allowed the player total freedom in their approach to collecting their ticket pieces, The Norwood Suite has a fairly prescriptive path in place for progression. Some items may be found off the beaten path, but the primary objective feels at times like railroading -- ironic given it was the previous game which featured trains. The widespread, warm reception of The Norwood Suite in comparison to the non-coverage of works of Oleander Garden, TIMEframe, or 0_abyssalSomewhere exemplifies my issue with the former; it is off-beat, 'outsider' art presented in a manner which is palatable to non-outsiders.

To pilfer the thoughts of our greatest mind, "Cosmo D reminds me of Mr Brainwash." Like Mr. Brainwash or Banksy, there feels to be a sort of appropriation of the work by those on the periphery of the core game/art world. Cosmo D's human are of malformed flesh less to make some grander point of bodily discomfort and dysmorphia, but to come across as too weird to be uncanny, too ordinary to be anything but human. This holds true throughout the experience, striking me less as the autonomy of the self as actualised in Second Life, and more like the interpretation of that digitised Other by one who exists as an observer, a trouble maker, a mocker. By way of example, The Norwood Suite is Griffin and Justin McElroy's intentional grotesqueries made for their corporate sponsored, lampooning of the Other in their Second Life Monster Factory videos. It is insincere. Superficially about something, but altogether hollow.

Leaps more ambitious than Off-Peak, The Norwood Suite builds upon that game's themes of creative labor and being trapped in a city trying to devour you, while sharpening the presentation and providing more opportunities to interact with the world. This is a proper adventure game with a whole bunch of inconsolable weirdos demanding favors, each puzzle opening up new areas of the hotel and the conspiracies holding it together. Maybe the best character writing in any of Cosmo D's games, particularly the group dynamics. Worth having a guide on hand for the last few puzzles.

I'd been an Off-Peak fan for SOOOOO many years before realizing that Cosmo-D had made other games! Surrealism can be really fantastic when used properly in games (and actually almost any media for that matter). The Cosmo-D games push that, and test boundaries, but never stray ~too~ far into a complete loss of meaning. Which I really like, and is an art in itself.

I think that where Off-Peak broke through to something amazing for me, The Norwood Suite has demonstrated more to it. I think this is a very solid game. Not too hand-holdy, but not meaningless either. A great start of something very interesting after the first game.