Hotel Dusk

Some of my recent finished games have been ones I've gotten an hour or more into and given up on, only to pick back up months later. Hotel Dusk, however, I went into completely fresh immediately after Superstar Saga, and was finished within a week. The game chronicles a night in the life of ex-New York cop Kyle Hyde, who's looking for an old partner who double-crossed him years ago. The story moves along at a good pace, but really never grabbed my interest that much. Even during the climax, I found myself bored and hoping I was at the end. The root of the problem in the story for me was how so much of it hinged on characters you never meet in the game. It's much easier to remember people's backstories when you can put a face to the name, so going by just names caused a lot of the plot to get jumbled. Another big problem with the game was that it churned out the same old boring puzzles- I could divide most of them into puzzles I've seen before many times on the DS (shutting the DS to make the two screens touch, matchstick puzzles...), or mini-games that weren't particularly fun (dumbed-down bowling, tearing down brick walls, even some hidden pictures). To see this game reviewed so well, I found the plot and puzzles, the meat of the game, fairly disappointing.

That's not to say the game didn't do some things well. The whole package was quite polished-The detailed first-person view was a nice surprise; as was the rotoscoped animation (which reminded me constantly of A-Ha's "Take on Me" video) and the overly-gritty-but-in-a-good-way dialogue. The real standout, for me at least, was the music. Most of the time music in games gets old pretty fast or I just find forgettable. The soundtrack to Hotel Dusk was upbeat and jazzy for the most part, but always seemed to set the right mood. It was a nice touch to something that's so often skipped over in video games. While there was a high level of polish in the music, dialogue and graphics, it unfortunately isn't enough to cover up the turd of a plot, and left Hotel Dusk feeling particularly mediocre.