Last Window: The Secret of Cape West

 "Victory comes from finding opporturnities in problems."
- Sun Zu

Today I've got a pretty damn good one and it's called Last Window: The Secret of Cape West, a good ~15 hour game and the sequel to Hotel Dusk: Room 215 but with only very little connections to that one. The game was developed by a company named Cing in 2010 on Nintendo DS which went bankrupt after the game's release. It`s a point-and-click type of adventure game however the story is an investigative type mystery similar to the Gyakuten Kenji games (Ace Attorney spinoff games about the prosecutor Miles Edgeworth, the second one happens to be my favourite out of the AA game series) - the style of this one is however nothing like it. To put it simply it's a mix of a visual novel (a book-type game) and you investigate in a rather old 3D style.

Last Window: The Secret of Cape West tells a rather cinematic story with neatly animated character models that are most likely traced over real life people moving. And it includes somewhat sluggish gameplay as well - not that it's bad, just slower than what we have in most of the games in the current generation of gaming consoles. The story is about living in a multistorey apartment named Cape West which used to be a hotel in the past, it tells about the the few people in it and the many mysteries connected to them all.

In 1980, a 34-year-old hard-boiled ex-detective named Kyle Hyde happens to get fired from his current salesman work due to his, hmm, passive attitude towards work, and to top it all even his apartment where he's on rent is getting sold off soon, and everyone on the apartment had gotten a notification letter about a week earlier but our main character happens not to read letters so he gets surprised, but worry not as there is still time, and it all takes place during later half of December and as it's nearing towards christmas, Kyle sees a mysterious woman in a black dress and a hat leave the apartment he lives in.
The story's timeline is pretty short, about a week, and during that timeframe our lazy salesman protagonist gets his detective intuition and senses back as he gets a letter from an unknown individual, claiming for him to find an item called Scarlet Star which disappeared 25 years ago and to give it to the culprit behind the murder 13 years ago. The reward of doing this act: The answers Kyle is looking for of his father's murder from 25 years ago.
A person named Rex Foster appears all of a sudden and goes around asking Kyle's acquaintance's who he is. Rex's presence sets other things afoot - different types of powerful criminal organisations which are never truly dealt with, are still heavily a part of this story and everything behind it.
Every chapter ends with reminiscing and remembering what events transpired earlier.
Well, there are quite a few past unsolved cases in this game - and to Kyle's surprise, his father, Chris Hyde, unlike the lawful Kyle, happened to be a safecracker, and to make the mystery deepen, Chris also happened to end up dead around that time, 25 years ago, his body found days later as he was shot to death, case left unsolved, and now the government suddenly opens it up.

 Kyle has a suspicious history himself as he had shot a co-worker during his time as a cop, the co-worker went missing after it and Kyle had quit his job. However Rex claims that despite all that, in the very same house that Kyle's living in, there's someone with a much shadier past than him. Talking about Rex, it's too bad that the company who made this game went bankrupt because they certainly had potential to make another one about Rex and his goals.

Now as the story starts, Kyle is a person who barely knows the eight other people living in his apartment but this story is about to be one of when a man starts to notice the bigger picture around him. A mysterious woman, a robbery, a death, an accidental fire alarm, Rex Foster, Marie whose brother died 13 years ago in a car accident where the breaks failed, and her husband died in an near-identical way half a year ago. This is suspected to be an insurance fraud by the insurance companies which Rex supposedly works for.. . . Many mysteries related to the small apartment he lives in. As the story progresses to its ending, the man who lived his monotonous life without talking to his neighbours manages to create friendships, save lives, find out deep secrets of everyone and figure out his own goal - and it's all connected in a well written manner as it does not feel forced, a nice handling of synergy is there which connects everything together. There's a decent reason to all of it, why is this one apartment which used to be the Cape West Hotel 13 years ago holding half a dozen murders connected to it and why is everyone acting so suspicious? Well, play the game to find out! However I will say this: The game goes in quite a different direction from what I expected it to, you see, you really get to understand the tenants. The characters that at first seem really annoying and off-putting, and Kyle's detective habits really don't help the case, become people that you get to know. And I really get it now - the meaning of this game and this story is about accepting the past.

Example of a case in the game, 13 years ago:

When the apartment was a hotel a party was held by the owners on the first floor of the building. The owner's wife, Kathy, had disappeared and the owner told the people to find her. She was soon found, well her dead body was, as she died due to a cyanide poisoning. The LAPD thought it to be a suicide but the poison container did not contain her fingerprints as well as her costy ring was taken by someone. Main problems that the investigators had were two: The poisoned bottle Kathy McGrath drank from went missing, and the huge number of guests to the party that came and left only made the process harder.
This, as well as certain other deaths related to Kathys are being handled in nice manner.

Now let's  talk about the music. The atmosphere it creates in this game is absolutely fantastic. The soundtrack for this game is one of my favourites in a handheld console, easily. Let's list some of these that you can check up on a site such as YouTube:
Clearing the Mist
Streets Have Memory
Gusty Town
Dancing Cat
Glass in the Hand
Town Dyed Purple
Sorrowful Night

Talking about some flaws,
As I mentioned before the gameplay could be a bit too slow, the camera angles are nonexistent as well and some of the information was hard to follow, too many unsolved murders related to this and that person make it feel tiring - because it's repetitive. I understand that keeping up mystery brings interest and a murder is much crazier than stealing (which does happen in this game - the Scarlet Star was stolen after all!) something or any other criminal act, but there should have been more variety.
Story starts off a bit too often at the beginning of the chapters as "I woke up from slumber" which I see as a generic and cliched, lazy way of starting a chapter. It does, however, fit the setting and how the events play out in this game; the man, Kyle, lives in the apartment and spends day after day trying to solve the case of the Scarlet Star and everything else connected to it.
I feel like the ending is too realistic as in things just have to happen. I wanted to talk with the other tenants. It's too bad they left. During the gameplay, remembering some of the events and the tenants's names was somehow very tiresome, however at the end of it all, it was a nice journey.
There's one part in particular near the ending where you have to find certain things which was really, really tiring, it's supposed to be the hardest thing to do in this game I guess but as far as gameplay and enjoyment goes - Z, z, z.

This was a beautiful game, I think. It's no masterpiece of anything but it had style and entertained me more than it did not due to its style which is not often seen in games.