The simplest way to describe Hotel Dusk would be to call it an interactive novel. You hold the DS on its spine just like a book and you use the touch screen to wander around a hotel, look for clues, and talk to people. Walking is simple enough. On the touch screen, your character is represented by a circle with an arrow that indicates what direction you are facing. You hold the stylus on the screen in the direction you want to move and off you go. If there's anything of interest you want to look at along the way, you can move in for a closer look. The top-down map becomes a rotatable close-up of the area you are examining. You can use the stylus to tap on most anything to learn more about it. Most objects are useless, uninteresting, or both, so tapping on a couch will reveal nothing more to you than there's a couch in front of you. However sometimes looking at that couch could reveal a clue that you might need to continue so it does pay to tap everywhere you can. Interacting with people and reading what they have to say is also a huge part of Hotel Dusk. Most of it is simply reading, but sometimes you get to choose questions to ask. Be careful though. Sometimes saying the wrong thing could result in an immediate game over.

Almost from the get-go, you'll see that this game is all about the story and not much else. Action and adventure are not checked in for the night and the result is a very slow game. That's not to say it's as slow as playing a text based adventure, but you'll definitely need an unusual amount of patience to enjoy this game. Literacy also helps too as you'll be reading a lot. All that said, I enjoyed the story to this game. The first few hours seemed somewhat random and disconnected, but, in time, conversations with guests and clues around the hotel show that these perfect strangers are more familiar with each other than it seems. Hotel Dusk is never in a hurry to move the story along, but it is interesting and it kept me coming back for more.

So how fun could an interactive novel actually be? Well, it isn't fun per se. I can't say I've ever had fun watching a documentary, but, if it's interesting enough, I'll be damned if I don't keep coming back to learn more. The same could be said of Hotel Dusk. I was usually interested enough in the mystery enough to continue onward, but never for long periods of time. It wasn't uncommon for me to fall asleep while I was playing.

My only real complaint about Hotel Dusk (other than the fact that it made me fall asleep) was the seemingly dead ends I would hit with clues. Characters were fairly good about pointing me in the right direction on what I needed to do next, but there are a number of times in this game where I had absolutely no idea what to do. I literally wandered the hotel looking at everything and anything in the hopes it might be the clue I needed to trigger the next conversation or sequence of events.

Overall I enjoyed Hotel Dusk. The story is interesting and the game has a cool style to it. I loved how the characters were modeled after the music video "Take on Me" by A-Ha. I could see myself playing a title like this again if the story was slightly more adult in nature and there was a smoother transition from story arc to story arc. Hotel Dusk is a good game, but you must have a sense of patience in order to get through it much less enjoy it. This is probably the coolest, boring game I have ever played.

6.5 out of 10

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