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.

ERASED: Boku dake ga inai Machi

"You are seeing his comic book about a girl who is in Hell and her father who goes to Hell to bring her back."
- Jodi Picoult 

It's the year 2006. Satoru Fujinuma is a 29-year-old pizza delivery man who very much aspires to be a mangaka as he's a talented artist, and he happens to have another skill which no one in the world has: the ability to get strange sensations of when something really bad - a death in particular - is about to happen, and he's capable of changing the course of fate before the death happens. At the beginning of the story as he's delivering pizzas, Satoru senses something bad about to happen nearby, and he can tell it's going to happen to a elementary school kid who is about to be crossing the road. By investigating his surroundings he is able to deduce that a truck driver has fallen asleep on the wheel. As Satoru makes the driver avoid hitting the boy, he himself gets hit by a car.
He calls this ability Revival, where he's usually able to go back one to five minutes into the past after an incident has happened - and then he stops them from happening. The negatives of it are that sometimes things go bad for him.

After Satoru's accident his 52-year-old mother, Sachiko Fujinuma, stays with him for a while in his place and reminds him of a past case as they're watching the news; a case where two of his classmates and a girl from another school, from the time when Satoru was on the fifth grade, happened to disappear.

ERASED: Boku dake ga inai Machi (2016, trans. "The Town Without Me") is a 12-episode long supernatural crime-mystery animated series produced by A-1 Pictures. ERASED tells the story about a time traveler, and it handles concepts such as child abuse, kidnapping and murder. It is one of the better works of that particular studio in my opinion as I don't consider their overall quality that good. The anime is adapted from a manga of the same name created by Kei Sanbe. The original comic ran for eight volumes between 2012 and 2016, ending around the same time as the anime did.

A Revival happens as Satoru and his mother are walking from the mall, and Satoru's mother notices a man - and the man notices him - walking along the road with a young girl, getting on a car and then leaving the girl behind. Satoru's mother reminiscences back to the kidnapping cases from 18 years ago. She starts to suspect that the culprit is still at large despite there being a death row prisoner who was convicted for the crimes, and that's the person that she saw trying to kidnap the girl earlier. As she goes back to Satoru's apartment to wait for him, she gets stabbed by the culprit and the police surround the apartment after Satoru finds the corpse of his mother with the kitchen knife still stuck in her stomach; Satoru panics and tries to escape the police by running, and the next thing he notices in front of him is a young boy running next to him and the large announcement on his old school's wall saying "Ice Hockey Club 1988 National Champions."

During this time period of the grand Revival where Satoru goes 18 years to the past, to the time where the kidnappings happened is where the story takes place. The first part of the story which takes place from episode 2 to episode 8, what I like to call the "Kayo Hinazuki arc," is the best arc of the series and the most important. You can consider it the the meat and bones of the series. The arc introduces us to the past which is the main setting of the anime. The basic idea of the story is to tell the tales of the kidnapping victims from the viewpoint of a time traveler; what was going on during that time period eighteen years ago, and then see Satoru try to save them. Changing the fate of the past and avoiding the same events which unfolded back then is not an easy task however.

The story of Erased starts out pretty strong aside from the very rushed pacing of the first episode (which can still be overlooked in this show due to the quality of the first "arc"). Three kidnapping cases took place 18 years ago: Kayo Hinazuki (10) disappeared in March and her body was found after the snow had melted, Aya Nakanishi's (11) disappearance and Hiromi Sugita's (11) disappearance would soon follow suit. The kidnappings of these three young children is what Satoru is trying to prevent in order to prevent his mother's death in the present-time because Satoru believes that there must be a reason why he was thrown so far back in order to save her, as that's how the Revival apparently works. However it's too bad that the Revival was never actually truly explained in the series; it just exists. Many other people can have it, or can't have it, in the series. We don't know. All I can take from it is that it's a plot device to fix the problems of the world as Satoru as a kid aspires to be a superhero. Continuing on with the problems, after Kayo's arc, the story basically gets ready to already end as there are still three more children to save and a killer to catch in the last four episodes. As Satoru jumps between the past and the present in order to catch the culprit in both timelines, he has to face challenges and hardships which are quite well presented for what they are. The wrap-up is frankly too quick-paced and the story loses the atmosphere it had between episodes 2-8. Although the cast of characters in the story are not that great, they aren't bad either. Satoru's mother, Kid Satoru and Kayo are all great and interesting to follow. However, the identity of the killer is obvious and lackluster; there is not really any other possible person when you think about it, so the story should not be called a whodunnit, and the ending is kind of badly written from many different points of views when looking at what happened to the characters; Kayo's, Satoru's, the Killer's and Satoru's futures are pretty lame, honestly. 

The cool and rough atmosphere and modern clean style of the anime are great. In graphic novels/comic books the flashback aspects (flashback is an even which happened in the past in comparison to the current timeline of a story) are sometimes done in a way that the left-right, bottom-top parts of the panels/pages are drawn in large black lines. This is a style used in the anime of ERASED as well. During the majority of the story which is spent in the past, the anime has the bottom and top of the screen in black while the screen in which the anime is displayed is condensed in a more cinematography way. It even looks great (because it's a more fresh style) when the subtitles are on the bottom black part of the screen.

All in all: The Kayo Hinazuki arc is the only standout thing about the show from atmosphere, presentation and storytelling standpoints, but as it takes a good half of the story, ERASED: Boku dake ga inai Machi still ends up being a worthwhile watch and it still has more to talk about than many other series.

Something to take from this show:
+ Focus on the style and presentation in order to make the story enjoyable to follow.
- Too quick of a pacing can ofcourse also be detrimental to the enjoyment factor of a show; a well presented Substance - Style ratio is important to understand.

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.