Hotel Dusk: Room 215

"Two souls but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one." 
- John Keats


Friday 24.12.1976, New York. In the police HQ a man gets a phone call which has to do about a person named Bradley. The man gets up while shaken and angry, and decides to head somewhere where he takes up his gun and shoots up Bradley.

Three years later.  The man who shot the gun wakes up to learn that this time his experience was but a dream.

Hotel Dusk: Room 215 (2007), much like its sequel Last Window: The Secret of Cape West (2010), is an investigation point-and-click adventure and mystery game that is half somewhat sluggy and limited 3D gameplay consisting of mostly moving forward with very limited camera angles, and other half of it is visual novel styled gameplay with rotoscoped character models that honestly look great. Hotel Dusk was developed by Cing on Nintendo DS before the company went bankrupt in 2010. I reviewed its sequel Last Window a while back and decided to get on the first game as well as I was actually impressed by how cozy the story felt, in fact Last Window is one of the better DS to 3DS games I've played.


Kyle Hyde, a man who quit the police force three years before the start of this story works as a salesman under a man named Ed Vincent who happens to be the friend of Kyle's late father (note: Understanding Kyle's father's fate is the main plot point of the sequel The Last Window: Secret of Cape West) and the boss of a company called Red Crown. The company of Ed's does a little bit of side work of finding things that are hidden than just selling items however, and this time Ed has a job for Kyle at a building named Hotel Dusk. Kyle mentions that he'll be doing this type of work until he finally finds Bradley as he begins his journey because of him - throughout the story, especially at the end of each chapter, Kyle thinks of Bradley in rather unrealistic ways. Kyle's slightly obsessed about finding the man even though he does it only to make himself feel better about what he'd done (shoot Bradley whom he knows) and to learn the truth about what Bradley had done as he still doesn't understand Bradley's motivations.

Kyle (as well as many other characters in the game) keep calling the hotel owned by a man named Dunning Smith a "dump" constantly, but he registers for Room 215 regardless. At least the room is cheap. Mr. Smith tells that Room 215 has a weird history to it; it's a room where wishes come true, and he also happens to mention that he has named all the rooms like a child would name their barbie dolls. There is also another type of history that the hotel has; a man who belonged to a criminal organisation used it as some kind of place for getting packages.
Smith claims that a tall, thin, blond man, who sounds like Bradley according to Kyle, came to the hotel once six months prior and called himself Kyle Hyde. This is the key for our main character to stay in Hotel Dusk to unravel the mysteries within it & find hints towards Bradley's whereabouts.


The story of Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is spent in exposing all the mysterious coincidences of the Hotel's current guests and everyone in it. There's a rude young girl named Melissa who lives with her father Kevin. A blonde young man named Jeff Angel who Kyle exposes hard in the game, a beautiful woman named Iris , the genius writer Martin Summer who'd written only one relevant book in his life, and a silver-haired girl who is unable to speak appears and she wears a bracelet with the name Mila on it. There's als the staff personnel of Hotel Dusk. All these characters hold deep secrets in them and it's Kyle's plan to expose them - as he feels that it all points to Bradley. Kyle saw Mila walking next to the road about a hour away and she got a ride from a man named Jeff to Hotel Dusk which seems to be Mila's destination. According to Kyle, Bradley had a sister named Mila and that Bradley was wearing the very same bracelet the silver-haired girl is wearing. There are many mysteries about Hotel Dusk and it's connections to Bradley and the final answer beyond the events that connect most of these things - the last thread that Kyle has to pull, so to say, is quite neatly laid out.

Kyle Hyde's job from Ed Vincent in Hotel Dusk is two find two items: a "magazine" and a "red box", but as expected on his journey he runs into a case and two, one of them from 10 years ago. In the hotel back then a man and his daughter had visited it, and during the night the girl disappeared. Despite the father's actions of looking for his daughter throughout the night, she was never found, and then the police got a mysterious letter telling them where they could find the girl's body. However mysteriously enough she was never found. The other case Kyle runs to takes place in the present. As Kyle was a cop in the past, a man named Louis DeNonno was a small-time pocket criminal back then, and he works at Hotel Dusk now. Louie (as Kyle calls him) had a friend who got dough from a serious criminal organisation named Nile, but he was off'd and the money went missing. Nile believes Louie is an underling of a bigger shot who has the money and the LAPD claims that Nile is keeping and eye on Louie instead of straight up offing him. The Nile case Danny got himself into was about art thefts and he worked with a man named "J." Louie believes that "J" killed Danny and got the money. Danny had a plan of getting rich and skipping town - by stealing the crime org Nile's stored artwork, and he mentioned about an angel painting that costs a fortune to Louie. As Louie got to Danny's almost dead body he heard one last thing; J betrayed Danny, and J was a cop.

Also there's quite a bit of cop slang in this game to enhance the story, mostly between Louie and Kyle, and during the ending segments of each chapter with Kyle's narration when you go over everything that happens in the chapter.

The soundtrack is not "as good" as in Last Window but it's still great and it also has quite a few of the same tracks used in that, and those ones are great. Some of my favourite tracks include: Amber Sunset, Dead Stare, Play It Again, Rainy Night and the Last Sleep.
The same can be said about the characters. Although in Hotel Dusk they do the same things with them - you get to know the cast and everything about them throughout the story - I believe that things such as character development and a more well-realized character writing exists more in LW compared to HD.
The animated character models are nice to look at as always.
The story is rather nice, however, Mila's plotline is pretty cringeworthy to me. I had a similar problem with the main storyline of 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors which is a similar genre DS game as Hotel Dusk.

However - even with all that praise towards Last Window from me, let's talk comparatively for a bit. Although it's not a criticism towards this particular game but more towards its sequel The Last Window: Secret of Cape West, and maybe even the reason why the company Cing went under the rocks: There's quite a bit of similarities between HD:R215 and LW:TSOCW in their structure, storyline, style of the game and the character writing, which kind of smells of bankrupt storytelling.

Now, let me explain:
 Both of the series deal with the same main character who's under similar circumstances with his life - a problem he has to personally handle, and he spends a week or so throughout the game in a multistory building. A Hotel in this game, his apartment the old Cape West hotel in Last Window. In neither games Kyle, the MC, really knows the people (despite Last Window's setting taking place in his apartment building)
 Both games are semi hard-boiled mystery games where you go door-to-door to act thug towards the residents and make them spill the beans so Kyle can progress towards the truth. Also as far as the story goes, a serious criminal organisation named Nile is related to both of them but they're never handled with personally. I've noticed that all these visual novel mystery games use these overarching villains as sequel bait quite often.
 Both of the games are filled with coincidences, it's actually a plot point of the games "how can there be so many coincidences here?" and looking from one end a lot of the coincidences taking place, due to the important characters being around, does make sense. However from the very beginning when you think about it, it really is just "because of plot." It's literally impossible for everything to go down at the same time in such ways and all these important characters to be there at the same time as there's no real reason for that to happen - it's a hotel in the middle of nowhere as well.
 In both games you really get to know the residents of the buildings; after getting them to talk (after a good fight) the player gets to hear their whole life stories, their nastiest problems and their deepest secrets. Also in both games the side-kick character is very similar; in HD it's an ex-crook, in LW it's a guy that everyone thinks looks and acts like a thief.
 In LW there's a cafe in the apartment, in HD there's a bar and both serve similar functions in their respective stories.
 There are similar end-game puzzle-type missions you have to do where you gather objects and information, and it takes forever.

So yeah, the stories, albeit both of them very good in my honest opinion, and I truly prefer Last Window to Hotel Dusk as well despite it coming after, the fact of the matter here however is that Cing had quite a bit of regurgitated templates, tropes and ideas for both of these games.


For people interested in reading a summary of the slightly convoluted timeline of the game in slight spoilers, I guess, I've got you;

The timeline of Hotel Dusk: Room 215
1. In 1960 a plane crash happens and certain two women die.
2. 16 years ago, in 1963, a man named Robert Evans writes a book about a painter named Osterzone.
3. A girl named Mila and her father came to Hotel Dusk 10 years ago.
4. A story about a girl gone missing from Hotel Dusk happened also 10 years ago and it's when the hotel closes down.
5. A man named Robert Evans buys Hotel Dusk 10 years ago.
6. The art gallery owned by Robert Evans closes 7 years prior is suddenly shut down and he disappears as a man named Dunning buys Hotel Dusk. 
7. Dunning re-opens Hotel Dusk five years prior.
8. Louis's friend Danny gets murdered three years prior.
9. Kyle shoots his co-worker and friend Bradley three years prior.
10. Kyle Hyde -named person visit a hospital where a girl is being held and the Hotel Dusk, both six months prior.
11. Then there's the present-time with the mute Mila appearing at Hotel Dusk and all the weird clues towards Bradley and the angel painting. As Kyle investigates for Bradley he meets many people that connect to those mysteries and some that have mysteries of their own.

The Angel painting of Osterzone is related to everything, and I like how the mystery behind Osterzone was handled - it's not something you can easily come up with an answer to although it was not really a shock while playing the game due to how obvious it was made.


Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is a game worth playing, but as a first experience to the story, I really felt I got lucky for playing the sequel, Last Window: Secret of Cape West before this one as the character writing just felt much better in that one and the ending message of the game hit all the right spots. While I liked this game as well, when it comes to Kyle Hyde game series, I'd suggest anyone to try out The Last Window at least. Anyway, the cozy atmosphere I got from following Kyle's adventures was remarkable, and for that I must praise the soundtrack. It's one of the best OST's in a mystery series that I've heard. So on that note I'll end this post by posting YouTube links to some of my favourite tracks from this game series, such as "Violet Sky":

0) "Windy Street", "Rainy Night", "One Night", "Distant Memory", "Violet Sky", "Misty Time".
1) "Neon Light" - The theme of cozy nights.
2) "Stare into Heart" - Like pouring fresh cold water on your face.
3) "Waking Dream" - A little feel-good theme.
4) "Yellow Desert" - Such a powerful tune, perfectly fitting this series.
5) "Deceptive Proof" - Very calm track. These are the tunes I most prefer.
6) "Down a Drink" - Fun song to calm down the tensity.
7) "Twilight Sad" - I love this one when it kicks off. Sets up a nice atmosphere to moments.
8) "City Dyed Purple" - One of the Core Themes of the games.
9) "Streets Have Memory" - My Favourite theme of the Kyle Hyde game series.
10) "Blue Lady" - Mmh. Perfection.