Frankenreview: Hotel Dusk 215

via kotaku

It's just my opinion a fact, Brain Age would never have appealed to the masses were the DS not played like a book. Now it's nothing special, as A-Ha videos everywhere (better known as Hotel Dusk: Room 215) are exploiting the 90-degree rotational axis of the DS.

So what did reviewers think of this playable paperplasticback mystery?

Game Revolution
From moving to talking to puzzle solving, everything in Hotel Dusk can be accomplished by tapping, dragging or drawing...By touching the screen with the stylus, your little dot will move in that direction. If you draw near something worth investigating, a little icon pops up, and by tapping it you shift to a first person view of that area. When you place your stylus over an item of interest, the item lights up and you can inspect it further by double tapping... clipping a segment of wire from a coat hanger or jimmying a lock, are handled with the stylus.

EtoyChest
it doesn't take a long time spent with Hotel Dusk to realize that besides weaving an intriguing mystery, the game was designed to confound, confuse, and even frustrate time and again...a design methodology that is sure to please hardcore sleuths, while...if a clue was missed or overlooked, a player could find him or herself wandering aimlessly about the available areas of the hotel, knocking on doors and clicking on anything...

Modojo
I was thrilled about the control and visuals but I can't say the same about dialog. Dialog between characters seemed very stilted and a lot of the conversation seemed superfluous. A typical interchange sounded like this:
Maid: "I'm also the cook in this joint."
Kyle: "You're the cook here?"
Maid: "I'm the cook here, that's what I said."
Kyle: "So you're the cook here?"
Repeat that three or four times each time Kyle has to talk to someone and you'll understand how annoyed I was about the conversation

MTV Multiplayer
So far, "Hotel Dusk" has been a welcome surprise... it presents a few other things I didn't realize I wanted...[like ] the player to hold their clamshell DS sideways...[which] allows "Hotel Dusk" another odd classification: sideways first-person-shooter-without-the-shooting....[it's also] the first DS game I'm aware of that enables the player to hand-write notes about what they're doing directly into the game....[and] scenes play in widescreen -- also known as the aspect ratio of every PSP game. So here's a chance to sort of see what Nintendo might do on a PSP, given the screen space.

Rocky Mountain News
I think the developers may have confused black and white crime drama with noir...When you bump into characters the scene unfolds in that moving sketch art we saw 20 years ago in A-Ha's Take On Me video...While this intriguing game's plot is almost accidentally oneiric, it certainly never delivers on the ambivalence, the cruelty, the eroticism that instills most film noir with its gut-wrenching frankness....Instead the characters' dream-like isolation is bogged down with generic characters...

I find it a little refreshing to see the point and clicks coming back into style. And the DS finally makes the idea work off the PC platform.