In Hotel Dusk, you play as Kyle Hyde, a down-and-out ex-detective turned salesman. His boss asks him to go and check into this old hotel for a job he’s hired to do. But alongside that, Hyde is also searching for his ex-partner, Brian Bradley, who disappeared three years prior. Bradley is assumed dead, but Hyde believes that he’s alive and on the run somewhere. He hopes to locate him so that the mystery surrounding his disappearance can finally be solved. At first glance, Hyde checking into this hotel and the events that will take place are not connected. But as you go through the game, Hyde begins to think that there are too many coincidences for there not be connections to his missing partner and the strange hotel occurrences. In the game, you must talk with different characters, asking them questions and finding out answers, solve different puzzles, look for clues, and put together evidence to solve the case at Hotel Dusk. Solving the case in the hotel helps Hyde solve the mystery involving his partner from 3 years ago.

I’ll start with things that I enjoyed about this game. For one, I’m not good at shooter games, thus the appeal to this DS game. You use the stylus throughout the entire plot and there is little to no action, so it doesn’t require skill (thankfully) to be good at this game either. All of the different puzzles and tricks to figure out during the game were fun to do. They started out very easy (like completing a child’s puzzle for her) and gradually got harder or stranger. A couple times, I even had to seek outside help to solve a few of the mini-mysteries within the game. I also appreciated that you could choose to save your game at any time. I didn’t have to find save spots or go to some checkpoint. I liked the challenge of solving the mystery and because of the type of game this was, it was more like reading a book and getting to be a part of the story while controlling the characters.

There were, however, things that I did not like about this game (no game is perfect, right?). Not that I’m surprised, but there was some cursing within the dialogue that I found really annoying. But, it is rated Teen so at least I had fair warning. Another thing that drove me bonkers was how there was no voice acting at all. I do enjoy reading, but the amount of dialogue to read in this game is astounding. It would have been nicer to be able to listen to the characters speak to each other and not just scroll through all of the writing. And finally, though I said I liked this story, some of it was a bit complicated to follow. There are a vast amount of characters to remember and trying to remember how they are all connected is daunting at times. A little bit of the sub-plots of the game, I could have done without because they seemed to have nothing to do with the real story anyway; some of it was unnecessary. There was also some references to drinking alcohol which was not a problem for me, but maybe for younger teens it should be something to consider before playing.

Overall though, I’m glad that I found and played this game. It was easy enough to enjoy but had some challenges to make it interesting. If you’re one that likes to solve mysteries or figure out crimes, this might be a game you want to check out. For me, this game doesn’t have much replay value because once the mystery is solved, it feels done with nothing new to do. But with no violence and little else to complain about, I would certainly recommend at least renting this game.