The First Hour

Hotel Dusk: Room 215
Platform	Nintendo DS
Genre	Point and Snore
Score	2  Gameplay: 2 Fun Factor: 1 Gfx/Sound: 3 Story: 4
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Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is a point and click adventure game for the Nintendo DS. I reviewed the first hour of the game a few months ago and awarded the game a 4 out of 10 for its never-ending dialogue and slow gameplay. But that's just one hour of 30, how will the complete package turn out? Note the scores are out of 10.

For my review on just the first hour, please see my Hotel Dusk: Room 215 review at The First Hour.

Scores

Gameplay: 2
What can I say about the gameplay in Hotel Dusk? Do you like waiting for some text to slowly crawl across the screen and then hit a button? Do you like doing this for hours straight? Do you like exploring a location where you can check out a bunch of stuff but there's actually nothing of interest? Do you like extremely linear gameplay where if you don't check out the totally obscure item in the corner of the room besides the bed, you can't proceed with anything?If you said yes to all of these questions and are ready to sign the next 30 hours of your life away, then this game is right for you.

Fun Factor: 1
Simply one of the most un-fun games I have ever played. I'm not even sure if Hotel Dusk is really a game. It's really just a boring detective novel in video game format. And pretend you can only read at ten words per minute, and that you can not finish a page until you've carefully read every single word and considered its shallow, pathetic meaning.

Graphics and Sound: 3
I praised the graphics in the first hour for its unique pencil-drawn character art and stuttering animation. But when that's essentially everything the game has to offer? It gets really old, really fast. There's about 10 characters in the game and they all look okay, but you've seen them once you've seen them the rest of the game. Also the music is awful in this game. It's elevator melodies over and over again. There's about three music tracks in the whole game: a kind of slow tempo, medium tempo, and a little faster tempo. No voice acting and worthless sound effects round out this category.

Story: 4
There's a pretty deep story in Hotel Dusk, but it relies on an incredible number of coincidences to make it even semi-believable, and even then, I was never surprised when a new "twist" was revealed. The story itself seems kind of interesting: art thieves, murder, kidnapping, plagiarism, and betrayal. The problem is, none of that actually happens during the game. Hotel Dusk takes place over just a few hours, and it's more about the reveal than any actual action. I just wanted something, anything of interest to happen. One time a little girl got locked in a dark room on accident. Another time my hotel phone rang for the thousandth time. That's about the excitement level this game reaches. There's a variety of characters but they all talk way too much, more of a gameplay issue than anything, though the dialogue is well written. It's just too bad the actual story was told so slowly and blandly.

Overall: 2
Unfortunately, Hotel Dusk is one of those games where I was right originally. This is a bad game. The first hour is incredibly indicative of what is to come. Slow, boring, and pointless "gameplay" wrapped around a below average story and the same five frames of character animation that were cool at first, but 30 hours later? I recommend you avoid this game any way you can. Hotel Dusk is one place you should never step foot into.