Cardinal Points: Hotel Dusk - Text Adventure of the Year?

"Adventure Games Are Dead," is a phrase that has rapidly been losing credibility in recent years. The comeback has been strong, too: Sam and Max have made a return in episodic form, the Bone series of graphic novels have received a similar treatment, URU Live found new life in Gametap, and Autumn Moon Entertainment, a company composed entirely of ex-LucasArts employees, are working on returning to their former roots with A Vampyre Story. It's obvious that the genre is as alive as ever, even without mentioning low-profile or hobbyist developers.

As wonderful as the PC resurgence is, there's an even greater platform for the adventure game, and it's already in our hands. The DS has really come into its own over the last two years, with a selection of titles that excel in being innovative and fun. It's almost tailor-made to run classic adventure games, which resulted in the extremely useful SCUMMVM being ported to the DS by hobbyist coders. Which is wonderful, if you happen to be in the possession of almost $200 worth of equipment used only for playing DS homebrew games, but what of the more budget-conscious adventure gamer? Thankfully, Nintendo has been busy publishing adventure games commercially just for that reason.

Cing has released two adventure games for the DS: Trace Memory in 2005, which met with lukewarm reviews, and Hotel Dusk this year, which has been widely acclaimed by this site, among others.

Hotel Dusk is structured much like Cing's earlier offering for the DS: the player uses the stylus or D-pad to move the main character, Kyle Hyde, around a pre-rendered environment, the Hotel Dusk. The other unusual functions of the DS are put through their paces as well, though I won't elaborate so as not to spoil it. Character interaction is carried out through the protagonist's notebook: as conversations progress, Kyle will notice inconsistencies or evasive answers and think of questions accordingly. At junctions in the conversation, the player is given the opportunity to pick which dialogue branch to pursue; certain choices will even get the player ejected from the titular hotel.

Sound like a classic graphic adventure? It evokes nostalgic memories of Monkey Island and informing people about the high quality of your jacket merchandise, right? Too bad. Hotel Dusk has far more in common with Slouching Towards Bedlam than The Dig.

In Hotel Dusk, the player can roam freely throughout rooms, examining objects at your leisure, regardless of how important they are to the plot. I can't fathom the amount of times I've tapped a bathtub with the stylus, only to receive a glowing commendation from Mr. Hyde. It doesn't matter if you need to look at something, it's there for the seeing. In most graphic adventures, you can't click on the furniture. Especially not if there's more than one of them.

After all, why would you? It's not like you can combine it with a rubber ducky to grab a key or anything. It's just a lamp, or a bed, or a table; the only reason to look at it is to help build a believable world through description - which happens to be the goal of both books and text adventures. Graphic adventures describe a world through pictures and polygons. It's much prettier, just like movies and other exclusively visual media, but subtle nuances of characterization and plot are lost. Without incidental description, Hyde's attitude towards the world would not have shown through nearly as well. He'd have just come off as a jerk instead of a hard-boiled former detective. Detail is one of the great strengths of text adventures, and Hotel Dusk is no exception.

What about the menu-driven conversation system? That's a hallmark sign of a point-and-click for sure! Superficially, it's true, but the real test is in how they work. In Full Throttle, for example, conversation's like a tree: you go up one branch, it forks off into other branches. When you get to the end, you have to go back and start over. Not too realistic, right? In Dusk, Kyle thinks of questions while the other person's talking, and interrupting people is one of the main conversational gambits of the game. Conversations flow like they do in real life: people say things when they think of them instead of always waiting for the other person to finish.

Although interruptions are a much-desired conversation method in text adventures, the system behind asking questions is much the same, because the player is responsible for saying the right things. A typical conversation will be conducted in >ASK and >TELL commands. Here's a quick example:

It's keyword-based, just like Kyle's questions. The only difference is that he does more of the work, which is actually an improvement over text adventures; it can sometimes be difficult to figure out what keyword you're supposed to ask about. For more on this conversational method, look at Galatea, by Emily Short.

Most of Hotel Dusk's gameplay mechanics can be traced back to text adventures. It's text and dialogue-heavy, relying on characterization to drive interest, descriptions to immerse the player, and realistic interaction models to make gameplay intuitive. It's been compared to playing a book, an action that is pretty much representative of text adventures.

I think the case is pretty strong: Nintendo is insidiously guiding the industry back to the text adventure! The Wii controller will soon be used to manipulate an online keyboard and all Mario games will soon rely on dramatic and innovative storytelling techniques instead of incredible gameplay. The future is clear, folks - I know where I'll be when text adventures become hot again. Do you?

Mar 7, 2007 - 3:12 pm | 0 comments
Karl Parakenings