Hotel Dusk is a essentially a puzzle-solving and item-finding game. Fans of Myst, Riven, Gabriel Knight, and so on will be happy to see that this genre has not disappeared.
The game is rich in "film noir" theme, from the run-down flophouse which serves as the game's setting to the gritty oddball characters you encounter. Even the quirky, terse vocabulary is done well, You will hear words like "dame" and so on with satisfying frequency. The game also heavily focuses on dialog instead of puzzles. You are trying to pump the inhabitants of Hotel Dusk for info, but at the same time trying not to offend them.
There are a lot of great features that make this unique. Amazing attention was paid to each character's personality and unique quirks, mannerisms, and vocabulary. The art direction is superb, with a first-person view to examine, The people are executed as striking police-artist sketches. The background music is interesting and evocative. Most importantly there is a great feeling of time and place. You get to feel like a tough ex-cop in a dead-end job. You feel the squalor of the dirty motel and the hope of its down-on-their-luck guests.
Also the game is wonderfully playable anywhere at any time: you use the touch-screen for all commands and can fold it closed at a moment's notice with no impact on game play.
The only two faults with Hotel dusk are its agonizingly slow pace and the poorly-developed, utterly linear sequence.
As for the pace, the game's main focus is on conversations which scroll onto the screen at a crawl, and after each sentence you must touch the screen to acknowledge the message before proceeding. I am not even a fast reader and yet I was always outpacing the text. Knowing now about how much time I spent on this clunky interface, I would never have even begun the game!
As for the under-developed sequence, this is a tricky thing to describe. On the one hand, the puzzles themselves and the writing for them is absolutely great. What detracts is the outdated one-way sequence of puzzles. Most of them have exactly one solution. Can't find Iris' missing envelope? Tough cookies. Don't know what item in-game will help you read the engraving on the old pen? Too bad, there's no hints. And you cannot proceed past these brick walls. You cannot skip the issue, explore some other area, solve a different mystery, or pursue hints.
Even the most basic Zork game or Choose-Your-Adventure novel has a more interesting horizon for possibilities. It is hard to believe that a software developer would waste the time to execute such a amateur framework with such great background music, art direction, and detailed dialog writing! Video game players got past this amateur stuff 15 years ago. I am shocked that this was even released after the advent of unscripted games like Grand Theft Auto.
If you are willing to overlook the throwback to the linear framework, then you will absolutely love Hotel Dusk. The art, atmosphere, and details are positively a pleasure to experience. But if you are the impatient type who can't wait for the scrolling dialog and won't want to find a walk-through when you get stuck, pass this up. The DS platform has plenty of better-developed titles out there.
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