The Colby Echo

Issue date: 2/23/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: amazon.com

Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is like a living book, more literally than you might expect. When playing the game, players hold their Nintendo DS vertically, like a book. And like a book, the game is concerned with telling a story, a story which will force you to (heaven forbid) read. You won't be crouch-running through post-apocalyptic cityscapes here. Hotel Dusk mostly consists of reading, analyzing and experiencing a dark and enjoyable mystery story. It's low on flash and big on atmosphere. It's a slow- burner, paced like a boring night that only gets more interesting as the hours melt away in speedy succession, that slowly seduces you, never lets go, and is hard to forget the morning after.

The night in question is spent with Kyle Hyde, an ex-cop who, after shooting his turncoat partner and best friend, quits the force and turns to the bottle. When the game begins, Hyde finds himself at the eponymous hotel. Through the course of the night, the player will guide him as he digs up secrets that lead back to his traumatic past.

To be honest, the narrative is no better than that of your average airplane novel, relying heavily on film noir clichés and telegraphing its plot with heavy-handed foreshadowing. But like the best stories, what is average in consideration is enthralling in the actual experience, and what matters more is how the story is told than the story itself. And Hotel Dusk tells that story in a way only a videogame could.

The first thing you'll notice is that the game's characters are rendered in a stunning visual style. While the game contains 3-D environments to explore, each character is 2-D, and looks like a roughly-animated black-and-white pencil sketch, constantly flickering and moving like people living in a flip book (think the "Take On Me" video). Minute animations, like Kyle wincing or smirking, are fluid and expressive. These are tiny details that eschew realism for expression, creating something that is dreamlike (and game-like), by building character out a few stock animations. And it works wonders. Hotel Dusk's characters, in their minimal, pulsing pencil sketch lives, are more human and believable than any million-polygonal space marines with individually rendered goatee hairs.

The game has a literary attention to detail in the construction of its world. Every little thing might not matter, but it all seems like it does. From the motel art on the walls to the newspapers lying around, every bit of Hotel Dusk breathes atmosphere and story. It's the 1970s, you're in the middle of nowhere, and, when you see flat, two-dimensional black-and-white people in the middle of a three-dimensional hallway, it feels like a dream you're living, that you feel inevitably compelled to explore.

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