Product Description

Hotel Dusk Room 215 is a hard-boiled crime story set in Los Angeles, 1979. Players take the role of Kyle Hyde, an ex-cop turned salesman trying to track down a missing friend. Clues lead to an eerie, old hotel rumoured to have one very strange room -- a room where wishes are granted. Players check in and get ready for a night of surprises as they meet a cast of unusual characters and to unravel the mystery of Hotel Dusk, Room 215.

• Players hold their Nintendo DS like a book and use the touch screen to grill characters, search for clues and solve mystifying puzzles.
• Players follow the plot twists and turns as they hunt for their missing friend and investigate the mysteries of Hotel Dusk.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #838 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Nintendo
• Model: NTRPAWIE
• Published on: 2008-09
• Released on: 2007-04-13
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .75" h x 5.00" w x 5.50" l, .25 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
Los Angeles, 1979. You are Kyle Hyde, an ex-cop turned salesman trying to track down a missing friend. Clues lead you to an eerie, old hotel rumored to have one very strange room a room where wishes are granted. It's up to you to unravel the mystery in Hotel Dusk: Room 215, a gritty new graphic adventure for Nintendo DS.

The DS system is held like a book, which allows characters on the screens to face left or right for more realistic conversations. The unique controls let even novices enjoy themselves. The unique hand-drawn character portraits and their animations are in black and white, making them exceedingly distinctive and able stand out, graphically speaking, from the rest of the game.

In the tradition of Another Code, the use of the DS to solve riddles is alive and well in Hotel Dusk: Room 215.

Customer Reviews

Plays like a book... maybe a little too much?
Before I start, I just want to say that I really enjoyed this game. The plot's fantastic (the game IS the plot, so it has to be really), and the graphics are just gorgeous. The black and white drawings of the characters looks perfect, and very sophisticated, although they're limited - the animations aren't very varied, and you've seen them all before you've played the game for an hour. (My favourite? Kyle's smug grin - cracks me up everytime!) The 3D graphics are pretty good as well.

The plot, as I've mentioned, is amazing. It's intriguing, and it manages to mesh everyone in the hotel together very neatly indeed. The characters are very well written, and they never seem to slip out of character. The game's humorous, as well, so it might make you chuckle every now and then, which is always a bonus. Despite this, I did feel like there were points that were a little contrived - how everyone in the hotel somehow managed to be involved in the main plot.. a very large coincidence, and not very believable.

However, I do feel like the game is a bit too much like a book. An interactive book yes, but more like a book than a game. You will spend 90% of the time scrolling through dialogue which you can't control (half the time when you do actually have to input something to a conversation, what you say makes no difference, or any answer apart from the perfect one will get you kicked out. So there's not much leeway there.), and the rest of the time is spent solving fairly simple puzzles. (a jigsaw puzzle. Yippee!)

I personally really enjoyed the game, even if I finished it fairly quickly, but I wouldn't advise players who are into more action games to buy it, as you have to sit tight for the majority of this one. Also, people who have a short fuse may feel a wee bit annoyed when having to sit through the dialogue again and again and again because of Game Overs.

Superb Game
Wow, what an amazing game.

I bought if for my wife, it hasn't been in her DS yet! Over the last month or two I have spent almost sixteen hours playing the game. It is a superb idea and works very, very well. I've never been inclined to write a review before, that alone shows how good it is.

The characters all feel real, and even if I didn't play for a few days the next time I turned it on they were easy to remember.

There are many puzzles and fixes to get past and only on one occasion did I need to get help, I honestly expected to need the walk through an awful lot more.

If you're in two minds about this I say buy it five starts isn't enough for this one!

I'm not sure if there is any intention to make a sequel, but hopefully there are enough loose ends to tie up a second could be justified.

Kinda slow...yet kinda cool !!
As the previous reviewer metions, the comparisons between this game and 'Trace Memory' are unavoidable. Hotel Dusk: Room 215 follows a lot of the formula and borrows most of the same elements of Trace Memory, but in a package that's far more mature almost to the point where you'll wonder if you really saw "Published by Nintendo" on the packaging. The almost overly extensive, wordy narrative and slow pace are a little hard to ignore, but hey -- this game's supposed to play out like a good detective mystery. And it indeed does. Hotel Dusk is a great read even if it takes a while to figure out what the heck's going on.

The game's tale unfolds through a very old-school point-and-click adventure style. It's a genre that's slowly died out over the years, but with games like Phoenix Wright hitting the scene it's a genre that's strengthening in numbers on the Nintendo DS. In Hotel Dusk players have a little more freedom than Capcom's lawyer series thanks to a more open environment and more things to do. You travel from area to area by sliding the stylus around on the map, with the other screen showing Kyle's view in full 3D. If you manage to enter an area that can be inspected, clicking on the magnifying glass icon will shift to a closer view to see and interact with items.

Hotel Dusk takes a cue from Nintendo's Brain Age and presents its storyline just like a storybook, going so far as to require players to rotate their systems and play the game in vertical fashion. Because the game's played entirely with the stylus this vertical orientation works. And yes, it's both righty and lefty friendly. The story is truly engaging even and handled far better and far more interestingly than Trace Memory, which sort of collapsed towards the climax. Even allowing for plot issues, Hotel Dusk's story is solid all the way through.

Absolutely, positively do not play this game if you're not fond of reading in videogames. Hotel Dusk's dialogue is incredibly extensive, and requires lots of interaction of the player to explore several conversation trees. Some conversations can actually end the game if you pick the wrong question or answer, so it's important to pick up on the different characterizations so you know just how to handle the interaction. The wordy dialogue is easily Hotel Dusk's biggest hang-up so you should know ahead of time what you're getting into. But if you've trained yourself with the previous two Phoenix Wright games from Capcom then you've got nothing to fear. All in all, it's a nice revitalization of the point-and-click adventure genre on the Nintendo DS.