Cape West is a game that’s pretty close to its originator but falls flat in ways so mundane it becomes incredibly frustrating.

The character driven behind the scenes view of a thrilling crime drama just isn’t there, at least not as much or as well done. Betty and Charles could be removed entirely with minimal changes to the story. Will is basically nonexistent despite the key role they play in the mystery and how much further his character could’ve gone. Dylans later twist is so heavily foreshadowed I think it completely detracts from every scene he shows up in before and after that twist is revealed. Mila, the 19 year old girl you met from the first game who had just woken up from a 10 year coma 6 months ago is now attending a fine arts school by herself, somehow, I guess.

And it’s sad too, cause Milas appearance marks the beginning of one of the best parts of the game, maybe the only area I think outshines the original. Hotel Dusks exploration of the melancholy feelings that come with Christmas was incomplete, in my opinion. I didn’t dislike it, it’s just that in game all of Kyles interactions with the subject come from interacting and talking to children. This makes a lot of sense, obviously a lot of the weird gray feelings people get from Christmas comes from putting on a performance of happiness for the children in their lives, I get that. But at the same time very little focus is given to those themes, there’s very little adult engagement with the topic. By and large the Christmas element of Hotel Dusk is putting up a Christmas tree for a kid because her dad didn’t. The interactions you have with that dad where you talk about Christmas are so short and brief, it just didn’t really feel fully explored to me.

But Cape West completely and fully brought it all together, in my opinion. Besides the brief return of Mila, the rest of Christmas is a pretty lackluster holiday for Kyle. His dinner plans get cancelled, he didn’t get gifts for anyone else, and he spends the night drinking with a friend after another one bailed on him. It captures those conflicting feelings of not really caring for Christmas, thinking it’s just another day of the week but also wanting to find reasons to celebrate, finding connections with people even when the plans you make with others keep falling apart. It’s all adults interacting with the holiday but not really celebrating it, remembering past winters alone, and that fits a lot better within the world of Hotel Dusk/Cape West than just putting up a tree and everyone smiling.

Unfortunately, though, besides how much I love the game’s 8th chapter, I just don’t have much to say otherwise. It’s just overall much more empty feeling a game, solving mysteries in Kyle’s past I honestly don’t think needed answering. Considering this game never even made it to the states due to Cing’s bankruptcy, I assume that this game was rushed and little underdone. It could’ve been something better, maybe, but it’s not.

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.

I’m starting to think Animal Crossing might be good or somethin…

Before I get into my thoughts and opinions some quick info about my playing of this game that I think gives important context; I’ve been playing, in emulator on dolphin, since the end of January. I didn't time travel at all, I tried to avoid googling anything about the game, and I didn't interact with the e cards at all. my only source of info about the game was (mostly) a pdf scan of the Nintendo power guide.

The reason I'm letting myself write this review now is I paid off the final debt to Tom nook (the crazy bastard was buying turnips for 896 bells) today! That's really the only big completion milestone I made, I’d guess I finished about 50% of the museum and like 20% of the catalogue. I wasn't rushing any of these things, I certainly didn't try to minmax gamer strategize them either.

So, all that out of the way, man what a game! My history with animal crossing started with new leaf in middle school and then into new horizons in college, to today, still in college I guess <_<

Point is, I’m no stranger to the idea of the series slow shift away from what people really resonated with. Even with only the previous experience of NL, NH was an insane downgrade. and I've constantly heard, to the point of mocking it a bit, the idea that the series became "too nice" or something.

And now, finally having gotten fairly intimate with the series very first game, I do absolutely now think even less of NH than I did before. The core, day to day gameplay of Animal Crossing was basically already perfected here. Just at a fundamental level I booted up this game daily for completely different reasons than when I played NH every day. sure, I was checking for fossils or browsing shops every day in both, but NH daily play session is almost more comparable to doing daily quests in Fortnite than it is to my daily play sessions in Population Growing. I booted up this game just because I wanted to keep existing in its world. I wanted to walk around my town just because it felt good to walk around. I would throw fish away when the shop was closed and I couldn't sell them just so I could keep fishing.

Most of my issues with the game kinda revolve around the few ways the game didn't let me get truly immersed in it. I legitimately wanted to use the in game diary every day and was so immensely disappointed by the fact you only get one unique diary entry per month. Sure, I can just edit and keep adding to it I guess, but it just seems stupid to not let me just write daily entries. Finding out I couldn't immediately kinda took the wind out of my sails, I have to assume it's like that just because of memory card limitations or something. Still a disappointment.

Another kinda issue I had with the game was the frequency villagers move in and out. It almost felt like an emulation bug or something how every time me and my girlfriend visited towns we'd instantly swap and trade like 2 villagers at a time each. It's not like a game breaker or anything, it just kept standing out as odd every time it happened.

And admittedly, this feels a bit unfair to complain about, but the lack of fashion options in this game is crazy. I understand from a design philosophy perspective the desire to not let you change too much about your in game appearance like face/hair, I think that makes sense (ignoring the inability to choose skin tone, that’s still insane). But you couldn’t even separate hats from shirts? Umbrellas get more unique designs than clothing, it’s just bland.

But my biggest, absolutely most hated element of this game though has to do with sending letters. I won't get too into it here, it's a very new thing to me and I'm still kinda exploring how I feel and talk about it, but I did spend a lot of my playtime in this game as a method of age regression for myself. I dumped all the furniture I liked anywhere I could, I’d plant trees and flowers anywhere I could with no plan or strategy. I purposefully was playing this game like a kid and had a lot of fun doing it. And so, when I was first playing and decided to write letters to all my villagers, it was a huge fucking slap in the face for the game to tell me "uhh write with better grammar dipshit lol". I genuinely was trying to explore childish emotions and feelings writing to my villagers, only for all of them to write back telling me I was being creepy or weird and to stop writing to them.

The grammar check is just horseshit, there's no way around it for me. Even setting aside my weird ramblings about nostalgic feelings or whatever, it just sucks so much enjoyment I could've gotten from this game away from me. The difference in emotions between how much I enjoyed writing weird and silly letters to my villagers VS trying my best not to accidentally have too many short sentences is like staring down into a fucking canyon. It made me stop writing to villagers because it was a chore! My girlfriend, who was also playing along with me in the beginning, also stopped writing to his villagers because telling them you liked the tumblr comic where they ordered a yummy silly gets a response begging you to stop sending letters. I would gush to Chevre telling her how cute she is and that I loved her only for the game to respond negatively because I didn't use capital letters. It feels fucking ridiculous, like I cannot understand why they felt the need to include it. It feels so backwards for the game to almost directly encourage you to just find some basic string of letters like "A. A. A. A." to send over and over instead of ever actually writing anything. At that point, why not have the Able sisters throw out your designs if you don’t line up with the arbitrary balance of colors the game wants you to have. It feels silly for me to complain so heavily about a basic grammar check, but genuinely when I found out about this I almost stopped playing altogether. It pulled me out of the world so much and so fast I just wasn't sure I wanted to keep going.

Alright, calming down a bit, I do wanna circle back around to something I mentioned earlier, which is the notion that older animal crossing games were better because they were meaner. I just think that’s not true, like pretty straightforwardly. Population Growing is absolutely meaner to you as a player, the villagers are generally a lot ruder than anything I ever experienced in New Leaf/Horizons, and I do kinda like that. I can definitely understand long time fans of the series finding the all around sweeter/kinder tone of the new games to be boring. But I think that’s like, so much lower on the rung of issues that make the new games feel lackluster its strange to treat it like the key factor “ruining the series” (and having it sell more copies than it ever has before). Absolutely none of the dialogue in this game had me blown away or made me think that New Horizons would be better if Chevre could call you ugly, it just felt a little different. I’d say variation in types of dialogue is a lot more important, and honestly Population Growing is kind of missing the weirder, quirkier dialogue I enjoyed in the later games. It’s a balancing act and I really do think the dialogue in this is a lot more comparable in quality to later games like New Leaf than people tend to think.

Overall, it really just blew me away how much Animal Crossing kinda perfected itself first try (or like, first and half since I technically played like the third release of the game. Absolutely wild the n64 version didn’t have the museum). I think considering how easy the game is to emulate and how much content never got carried over into later entries it’s more than worth a shot today. I guess if you’re looking to play with friends this is probably the worst entry you could pick since the multiplayer features amount to “go to a friend’s town while they sit around and wait for you to stop talking to their villagers”. But assuming you’re just looking to play alone, this is an easy recommendation, regardless of past experience with the series.