Hotel Dusk: Room 215
A PLACE YOU WON’T WANT TO LEAVE
Replay Cing’s novel take on the popular point-and-click adventure
» NINTENDO DS » 2007 » CING
My love for the Nintendo DS is well-documented, but it’s worth reiterating here. While many scoffed at its graphical power and gimmicky nature when it debuted, I was having the time of my life with Nintendo’s new handheld. Some games did indeed feel a little naff or lazy in their execution, but later releases like Cing’s Hotel Dusk were able to offer me an experience that many consoles of the time simply couldn’t match.
Hotel Dusk puts you in the worn trench coat of Kyle Hyde, a former New York City detective who is now a travelling salesman and searching for his missing partner. After passing a strange girl on the highway, Kyle arrives at Hotel Dusk and finds himself in a room that’s rumoured to grant wishes, and a building that’s filled with mysterious patrons. It’s an intriguing premise and it becomes even better as Dusk’s well-written plot slowly unravels like a delicate thread.
One reason why Dusk works so well is because it feels like an interactive novel, largely down to the fact you hold the DS like you would a book. Much of Cing’s unique game involves you chatting to people using dialogue options and easing information out of them, but there are also segments where you move around the hotel and use your stylus to interact with specific items in the environment, like you would with any point-and-click adventure. It’s a novel way of presenting a classic genre and highlights the strength of Nintendo’s handheld when it was used by creative minds.
This creativity extends to Dusk’s distinctive look, which highlights that you don’t need cutting-edge visuals if you have a stylised art direction. While characters in Hotel Dusk are depicted in black and white, the areas you explore are in full colour, giving proceedings a dramatic, dreamlike style. This is further enhanced by the fact that many cutscenes are often left unfinished, like a paint-by-numbers scene the artist couldn’t be bothered to complete.
While I enjoyed Hotel Dusk enough to pick up its sequel, I’ve never found time to play what would become Cing’s last game. Now I’ve got some time on my hands, it feels like a good opportunity to continue Kyle’s adventure some 13 years after I first started it.