I wish Hotel Dusk: Room 215 was more accessible than it is. It has all the requisite ingredients to become a giant hit. It’s a Japanese adventure game with a fantastic localisation, it was released on the Nintendo DS in 2007, at the height of its popularity, and it has a restless sketch-based visual style that immediately makes it stand out. The last decade’s seen plenty of similar Nintendo DS adventure games get another chance at life and become wildly successful: Ghost Trick, Phoenix Wright, and the Zero Escape series.
Despite what the PEGI 12 rating on the box art says, Hotel Dusk is aimed at a more mature audience. You play as Kyle Hyde, a former detective who quit the force after killing his partner during a case. This trauma ends up haunting Hyde in every aspect of his life, and daily, he refuses to accept that his partner is really gone. Since leaving the police, Hyde’s taken up a job as a door-to-door salesman, but it’s his search for answers surrounding his partner’s disappearance that brings him to Hotel Dusk.
It sounds intense, but Hotel Dusk isn’t entirely doom-laden. It’s hilarious when it needs to be, and more than anything, it’s a relaxing text-heavy experience. You spend the entirety of the game inside the hotel, and all you do as Hyde is walk around the various rooms, investigate clues, solve puzzles, and have conversations with the hotel’s other guests. It might be the least “adventure” ever put into an adventure game. The other residents staying at the Hotel Dusk are equally as complex as Hyde, each holding on to some sort of event in their past that they can’t let go of. And as an ex-detective, Hyde can’t help himself from getting involved in other people’s lives in the first place.
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