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.
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.