The Masque of the Red Death is not actually a game, it’s a theatrical production running in London at the moment by promenade theatre pioneers Punchdrunk. (I fear I may have painted myself into a corner by classifying these types of posts as Game Focus) What makes this production relevant to this blog is that promenade theatre is an interactive experience where you are allowed to wander about freely essentially creating your own experience within the stories being told.

Writing this piece is probably going to be a bit trickier than normal. This isn’t because of the different medium but because I’ve been playing video games since I was a child and can look at them with a reasonable detachment. However I found my visit The Masque of the Red Death an absolutely incredible experience and am now finding it difficult to talk about it without collapsing into a drooling mess of a fanboy. That’s not to say everyone would love it quite as much as I did, for me it just hit all the right buttons. There’s no point me trying to convince you to go see it yourself anyway as it’s sold out now until the end of the run, so you’ve missed out, truly.

The Beating of His Hideous Heart!

The Masque of the Red Death was originally a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. His stories were typically dark and morbid often revolving around vengeance, murder, and obsession and Punchdrunk’s production is actually based on a fusion of nine of his tales and also incorporates The Black Cat, William Wilson, The Fall of the House of Usher, Berenice, Ligeia, The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, The Tell Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado along with some original material in the same style. The various tales are told at different times in different places throughout the building, many running in parallel. The whole thing is looped to run twice per night to give you a chance to see other parts of the performance you missed first time around.

As an audience member you are given a white mask to wear at all times and told to remain silent. From there you are sent down a long dark curtained corridor until you reach a set of stairs and climb up into the world of Poe. You can explore the maze like building freely where each room has been intricately transformed into anything from an opium den to the study of a stately manor. The authentic environment and oppressive Poe-esque mood is all around you not just on a screen or stage, so it can really feel like you’ve stepped back in time and are part of this world.

The actors mostly ignore your voyeuristic presence as they play out their scenes around you except for brief and often terrifying or exhilarating moments of eye contact or touch. It’s a very strange feeling as you become a stalker trailing performers from room to room seeing what they do next. It’s your choice which rooms to explore and which actors to follow and that’s what makes the experience your own. Sometimes you can catch the final scene of a dramatic encounter with no idea what brought the character here and are left to fill in the blanks yourself. I’ve been twice now and have tickets one more time before the end of the run and with each visit I’ve discovered more rooms, more stories and other perspectives on the same stories by following different characters. You’re discouraged from traveling with friends, and if you follow that instruction then swapping anecdotes in the fabulous party at the finale is fascinating as everyone has different stories to tell.

Dreams No Mortal Ever Dared to Dream Before

The reason I write this blog is because I am fascinated by the ways stories can be made to be interactive, and typically this is about how you as the audience can affect a story being played out. However Punchdrunk have focused on a different kind of interaction, they have built a living breathing world of Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction where interactivity comes through exploration and discovery. It’s a very different spin on the idea than I’m used to and with the quality of the performances and the setting it’s one that has made a very strong impact upon me. Ultimately interactive storytelling is about giving the audience choice in what they get out of the experience and they have succeeded in that.

My background is video games and so I couldn’t write about this without drawing some comparisons. Similar concepts to Punchdrunk’s productions can be seen in a lot of a video games. “Free thinking” characters moving around the world independent of the player can be seen in everything from the 1992 adventure game Lure of the Temptress through to the 2006 RPG Oblivion, though generally the characters are just simulating real life and not taking part in dramatic stories. A closer comparison could probably be drawn with titles of the Interactive Movie era of gaming like Night Trap where you could switch freely between CCTV cameras in rooms around a house watching events unfold. The problem with using pre-recorded video was that player interaction was very limited and designers had to come up with ways to make the games interesting without letting the players affect the outcome of the live action footage.

Interactive movies were of course a critical and commercial failure. Personally I wonder if something good could have come from the genre if there had been an attempt to tell some really good stories instead of campy b-movies. However the general critical opinion seemed to be that gamers demanded more direct interaction with the game and if that’s the case then maybe this kind of voyeuristic storytelling that works so well theatrically couldn’t really translate to other mediums. Non the less I’m pretty sure sandbox worlds like GTA and Oblivion would be much more fascinating if many of the generic characters walking around the streets had their own interesting stories they were playing out. Maybe for it to be practical it would have to be on a bit of a smaller scale that those two examples but the potential is there.

Where Thy Dark Eye Glances

Ultimately The Masque of the Red Death is nothing new; Punchdrunk have been performing promenade theatre since 2000 and we’ve had similar concepts in video games for over a decade. What makes The Masque of the Red Death special is not originality, but execution. They’ve taken an old building and created a wonderful simulation of a gothic world filled with the morbid tales of Edgar Allan Poe. I loved the time I spent in that world and will be very sad when my final trip ends.

In case you’re not familiar with any of Poe’s stories I thought I’d end with these links to YouTube videos of three animated adaptations. There’s a really good short film version of The Black Cat by Rob Green on the DVD of his film The Bunker but sadly no one’s put it up on YouTube.

The Raven - A surprisingly good adaptation from a Halloween episode of The Simpsons.

Tell Tale Heart - A beautiful animated version made in the 50’s.

The Masque of the Red Death (Part 1, Part 2) - An illustrated reading of the story from The Dark Eye, an old adventure game about the works of Poe.

Vespers comes with a disclaimer noting that, despite the religious themes of the game, the author is not Christian and it is not an attempt to promote any theological agenda. Now I don’t have any strong opinions on religion so I’m happy to take the author at his word and enjoy Vespers as a piece of entertainment, and entertaining this is. Vespers by Jason Devlin deservedly won the 2005 Interactive Fiction competition along with many other wins in the XYZZY competition, which of course also means no one’s heard of it.

Set inside a 15th century Italian monastery besieged by the plague, you play an abbot who five days earlier closed the doors denying sanctuary to the sick in attempt to save himself and the rest of the priests from exposure. However all is not well inside the monastery and the suspicious demise of one of the priests along with the arrival of a strange young woman sets in motion a murder mystery that threatens to lead the player towards eternal damnation.

Like all IF competition entries it’s designed to be completed in under 2 hours although I’ll admit it took me a little longer than that, but there’s built in help and hints which should make the whole thing a little more accessible to those of you who don’t generally play Interactive Fiction. The game play for the most part involves exploring this small monastery getting to know its inhabitants and solving fairly logical puzzles as the pieces of the mystery slowly fit together. The quality of writing is excellent and the story is pretty damn compelling. So all in all it’s a top package, and of course it’s bloody well free!

Choices That Matter

Now I’ve finished the sale pitch I’ll get back on topic of this blog. What I really want to talk about is a couple of the really interesting interactive storytelling techniques used in Vespers.

Many of the puzzles in Vespers have multiple solutions, and you could simplify many of these as a choice between the easy way out and the harder but more satisfying solution. However these are more than just alternate paths through the game, they’re also moral decisions and your approach to solving the challenges you face will determine the game’s ending. I’ll admit I tried to do something like this in the white chamber but Vespers does it much better than I did. What makes it feel even more weighty is the character and setting, you’re not a typical gaming hero, you’re a man of god who wouldn’t whip a weapon out of his inventory at the first time of trouble. If you can get into that mindset while playing the game I found it added a real sense of dilemma to each problem.

Many video games that boast about tremendous choice typically only offer very shallow control over the story. Recently in BioShock you’re asked to save or harvest the “Little Sisters” of the game and it’s one of the least satisfying things about the game. Whether you choose to save them or not only really effects which of the two equally disappointing 1-minute FMV sequences closes the game. The extra upgrades you’re supposed to get by ‘harvesting’ are mostly given to you as gifts for ’saving’ them anyway. It’s also only really one decision repeated over and over.

Eye of the Beholder

The other really interesting thing about Vespers is the way it sets the mood for the story. The game is necessarily dark to fit the bleak scenario, and in the world of interactive fiction much of this comes from the descriptions of rooms, items and characters. Although the game presents little hope from the offset, the oppressive and doomed feeling within the monastery is amped up bit by by as the story unfolds and the descriptions become increasingly depressing. While one game description starts off as “The church commands from the north, its spires reaching up to Heaven.” as time passes it eventually reads: “The church rolls and laughs to the north, pointing Her sharp fingers in a perpetual mock at God.”. This approach makes a lot of sense because the descriptions provided in IF are usually presented as what the player character is seeing, often with their own thoughts and bias included. Vespers just takes it one step further than most by showing how the character’s mood and predicament affects how they perceive the world around them.

This approach to presenting a game world where what the player is seeing, through the eyes of their character, changes as the story progresses is something I’d love to see adapted into a video game title. The potential to see this visually instead of just through text is astounding, which leads me directly on to Vespers 3D.

Now With Added Shiny

A small team of indie game developers called Orange River Studio are currently working with the Torque Game Engine to build a graphical remake of Vespers. Surprisingly they are keeping the text based interface of the original but are adding in an animated 3D game world, music and professional voice acting. They’re calling this fusion of text and graphics 3Dif and I’m very excited to see what they come up. I contacted Michael Rubin, the man behind the project, who told me they’ve worked closely with the original author who is supporting the project and has provided guidance to maintain his original vision. He also confirmed that they were planning to replicate the way descriptions changed in the original version in the new 3D visuals. There’s no fixed release date yet but the developer’s blog shows encouraging progress and this is definitely one to watch.

As I’ve said before I’m quite strongly of the view that there’s a lot of great ideas being spawned in the IF community that the wider gaming community should see and that IF writers could reach a wider audience by taking advantage of modern gaming technologies. So I’m hoping projects like this will be a starting point for that cross pollination.

Resources

To finish up I’m going to give you links to everything you’ll need to play Vespers for yourself. You just need the game file and the interpreter for your OS.

Vespers Game File:
http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/vespers.z8

Windows Interpreter:
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/frotz/WindowsFrotz.zip
OS X and Unix Interpreter:
http://www.logicalshift.co.uk/unix/zoom/

Interactive Fiction (IF) is the rather fancy term for what I remember calling text adventures back when they were still sold commercially and when a Spectrum was the best computer I could afford. Truth be told I was never very good at them, they fascinated me as they seemed, to my childish eyes, to tell a real story and so I had lots of them in my collection but to be honest I don’t recall ever finishing any of them. At the time I kept this quiet around the playground because I didn’t want to be the kid who was crap at games, but in retrospect it wasn’t so much a lack of skill on my part but a lack of good game design in the cheap Speccy tapes I was buying. Excuses for the mistakes of my youth aside, here’s a question for you. Did you know they still make these games?

I’m going to be posting some Game Focus articles about some of the brilliant modern IF titles so I thought, for the those of you who aren’t familiar with modern IF, I’d give you a quick overview of what it’s all about and why you should care. And if you like good stories in your games then you really should care.

The Lost World

Text based adventure gaming disappeared off our store shelves in the late 80’s amidst a sea of poorly designed titles and an audience being won over by impressive graphic adventures. Like Arthur Conan Doyle’s dinosaurs the text adventures didn’t really die out they just left our game stores and migrated into their own hidden underground kingdom. Tech geeks disassembling classic infocom games eventually led to homebrew tools allowing fans to make their own games. Over the years that community evolved from nostalgic fans trying to recapture the essence of great games they once loved, to surpassing them altogether producing some of the most interesting and exciting mixtures of story and gameplay you’ll find anywhere. In all honesty they’ve earned the term interactive fiction.

You can roughly split the output from the interactive fiction community into three distinct groups, though they might not like me simplifying it like this:

• Classic Adventures - These are games that still largely resemble the old text adventures. Grand epics and adventures filled with puzzles and the same kind of exciting stories you get in mainstream gaming.
• Experimental - Short works designed to play around with what interactive fiction can do. This can be anything from a story and puzzle free art exhibits to deceptively complex single move games.
• Literature - It might be subjective what is and isn’t literature but there’s a lot of modern IF that tries to tell startlingly deep, emotional and meaningful stories with some really accomplished writing.

Some of the classic adventures are great but to be honest it’s the latter two categories that are much more interesting to talk about. It’s with these titles that IF is leaving conventional video game story telling in the dust. Each year some absolutely amazing games are being made and very few people outside the IF community are playing them. To me it feels like such a colossal waste of talent.

Mods vs Rockers

For their part the Interaction Fiction authors, while lamenting the lack of commercial interest in their works, have isolated themselves from the rest of the games industry in a cocoon made of their own intellectual superiority. The community seems driven to produce innovative works and in that they have succeeded. However alongside that I get the impression that graphics, music or any other presentational flourish are perceived at best to be mere trimmings and at worst a distraction from the words. With such high quality material coming out of their small non-commercial community it’s not surprising that they might not think they have much to learn from the industry churning out endless vapid FPS titles.

From our side of the fence most of us pretty much ignore what’s happening with interactive fiction. Video gaming forums are filled with fanboys working themselves up into a moist frenzy over titles like Katamari Damacy and Ico preaching about the virtues of originality and innovation. Free experimental titles like Crayon Physics, Tower Defense and Narbacular Drop spread virally and reach a level of fame in the community,sometimes even being adapted into commercial releases. Sadly interactive fiction barely gets a look in beyond an occasional short article or a quickly dismissed forum post. As much as we might pretend to ourselves we’re all about game play and innovation, we do love a bit of eye candy. We want some shiny graphics and kicking music not a page of text.

My point is that there’s not much interaction between the IF and video gaming communities anymore and this is a real shame. Not because I dream of a perfect world where we all sit around a camp fire together singing hymns. The real tragedy of the situation is that there’s little cross pollination of ideas between the two camps. While video game developers will steal ideas (sorry, take inspiration) from anything from AAA retail hits down to silly flash games they’re not really taking advantage of all the amazing ideas the IF guys have come up. The flip side is just as true, there’s so much more the IF community could add to it’s output if they could harness some of the presentation skills that are pretty much the norm in video gaming.

Let Them Eat Cake

It would be easy to paint the IF community as a bunch of snobs clinging to their text parsers as they produce what they believe to be great works of literature and scoff at our silly violent Gears of War. It’s unfair though, the authors of modern IF all have to be an unusual hybrid of a decent programmer and a talented writer to create the titles they do. So expecting them also to be designers and musicians who can take advantage of what graphics and sound can add to their creations is asking a lot. If you look at the key IF websites out there few if any display sophistication in their presentation but the content is solid, which I think belies where the talents of these people rest. For that reason I think the plain text nature of most modern IF is born largely from technical restrictions and later justified in retrospect as being the best approach.

Browsing the popular IF newsgroups it’s clear that the community is well aware of its limitations: Games require a separate bit of software to run them, first time players have to learn the esoteric language used to interact with the games, games are stored in a vast archive with little to help a newcomer to distinguish titles of interest, and a lack of any real marketing outside of the community. If anything they seem resigned to their position as niche and non-commercial and are just happy to be part of it.

Personally I don’t want it to be this way. There’s a lot of great games being made here that people aren’t finding out about, and I know there’s a lot of intelligent gamers out there who’d really enjoy them if they heard about them. Some of this stuff deserves to be reviewed on gaming websites and in magazines alongside Halo 3 and Heavenly Sword but I don’t see that happening. So for my part I plan to cover IF in this blog as best I can, picking out some exceptional titles and looking at what they do well.

Experimental Titles

To tide you over until I get around to writing some of these promised articles about more substantial works, here’s a quick run down of some quirky little experimental pieces. These are all pretty short and will give you some idea of the inventiveness that I’m talking about. I’ve included links to Baf’s excellent IF index for each game and on some of the pages you should find a handy ‘play online’ link, for the rest you’re going to have to download an appropriate parser for your computer to get them running. It’s not brain surgery to get this stuff going though and if it’s beyond you then I doubt you’ll enjoy these games anyway.

Aisle
Shopping in a supermarket you see a brunette haired woman standing in front of you. What do you do next? That’s all this game asks, you’ve got a single move to react to this scenario. Do you stare at her, try to kiss her, take off all your clothes, or just break down into tears. Over and over again you play a single moment in time, seeing how each choice plays out differently leading to it’s own tragic or comic repercussions. It’s beautiful, it’s simple and there’s almost nothing else like it.

The Space Under The Window
This short piece is an incredibly experimental approach to story telling. You start with a brief description of the starting scene, and instead of issuing the typical commands that are staple of IF interaction you instead choose words from the text. The story expands or contracts based on the words you choose, adding more detail, revealing inner thoughts, or taking the plot down a different path.

Rematch
Another one move game but from a totally different angle. You and your friends are about to die, you’ve got one move to stop it from happening. It’s a puzzle and a shockingly complex one at that. Not everything is exactly the same each time around in this groundhog moment and to solve this conundrum you’ll need to discern patterns in the chaos. The final solution is also possibly the most complex command you’ll ever have to issue in an IF title.

Whom The Telling Changed
Based on the epic of Gilgamesh in this game interactive fiction is the story itself. As a camp fire teller relays a story both the player and a rival both attempt to affect the tale being told. It’s a really interesting look at how stories can change to suit their audience which is pretty much what this whole blog is about really.

Photopia
A lot has been written within the community about this notable little title. It’s a very personal piece of drama following a story from a variety of different perspectives, initially seeming unrelated but leading to a highly emotion point of convergence. It’s not actually very interactive which has been the main source of detraction for the title, but it does something different and does it well.

That’s all you’re getting for now. I hope you take some of this on board and check out some of the titles I’ve mentioned above. If you like them, get your friends to play them too. More people need to know about this stuff.

Everyone and their best friends tennis instructor’s pet dog is talking about BioShock right now. Some games journalists are just about ready to declare this the dawning of a new era of interactive entertainment. I do love EuroGamer but Kristan is wandering into the Edge territory of taking himself and gaming far too seriously in his three page love poem. I love this game as much as any sensible person who’s played it and how could you not? It’s got great hi-def graphics, the retro setting and music is cool, the utopia turned dystopia atmosphere is fantastic, and the gameplay is solid and varied enough to avoid becoming dull. Let’s keep our heads though this is still a shooter through and through it’s not the advent of a new genre, it’s not the future it’s ultimately just a beautifully executed shooter and what’s more, and on-topic for that matter, a shooter with a fantastic story told really well.

Straight to Video Sequel

The hilarious Consolevania lads kind of dismissed the story by pointing out the competition for good stories in video games is not exactly fierce. Which is a bit unfair since there’s lot of good stories out there if you dig around enough, but I’ll admit the majority wouldn’t even qualify as meaty enough for a straight to video sequel to a shit horror film. (By the way on that subject if you do like horror you should track down Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, it’s really good. Really!) What’s more is that I think the BioShock story is not just good for a video game, it’s actually a pretty good story on it’s own merits and would be in any medium.

To allow myself a moment of self indulgence I think what makes the story in BioShock special is that it doesn’t feel like a story put together by developers looking to dress up their game, looking to tick all the right boxes, or looking to raise enough controversy to incite sales. BioShock is, put simply, a story worth telling. It’s about ideas and ambitions, and how peoples lives are shaped by these forces. For those reasons BioShock enjoys a special place in my gaming heart alongside Silent Hill 2, Metal Gear Solid 2, Final Fantasy VII and The Longest Journey.

An old dog

Much of how the developers have put the story together will seem quite familiar especially to you Half-Life fans out there. Maintaining the immersion of the first person experience necessitates a set of eccentric story telling conceits. Mostly these are just to stop you from killing other characters in the story or to force you to follow the story down a linear path. Let’s have a quick break down of what these tricks of the trade are:

• Mute main player character
• Important characters talk to you over radio
• Incidental characters talk to you from behind unbreakable glass until it’s time for you to kill them
• Player unable to use their weapon in the rare face to face meetings with other story characters
• Back story explained through audio logs

See, all sounds very familiar doesn’t it? That’s because Half-Life pioneered most of these approaches back in ‘98 and nine years later they’re still looking like some of the best ways to tell a story in an FPS game.

However to break it down into the techniques they’ve used doesn’t really bring across how much intelligence and charm they’ve put into the story telling. The game opens with your character sat on board a plane looking at a photo of his family, the title is shown and behind it we the hears screams and the sound of a crashing aircraft, next you’re immersed in water with debris drifting past you. You surface treading water in the middle of the ocean, the plane is burning around you and a strange monolith nearby your only hope for salvation. Inside the monolith you find a lift that takes you deep under the ocean while a pre-recorded tape explains Andrew Ryan’s vision for a better world for mankind until eventually you emerge outside Rapture itself and see his grand hidden society. By this point BioShock has already provided more mystery and more subtle plot exposition than 2 hours of non-interactive Hideo Kojima written cut-scenes and in fact has presented more interesting ideas than most other games on the market.

A Man Chooses

I grew up a PC point’n'click adventure gamer so to be honest I felt like the game missed a trick by not having dialogue trees. The characters in this game are wonderfully realised, so the fact that you can only ever listen to their world views and never challenge them seems like such a missed opportunity. If you take a look at Deus Ex, Knights of the Old Republic and Fahrenheit you can see that injecting choice in your story can often actually seem very shallow even amongst the most noble attempts. However in those games at least you felt like you had some choice and weren’t just being dragged along on someone else’s adventure.

I must admit though on that point though the game had me. I can’t explain exactly without spoiling a brilliant twist but your lack of choice actually leads to one of the most poignant moments in the game. I’ve not really seen this done as effectively since Adam Cadre’s beautiful mini interactive fiction title 9:05 (which I hope to cover in a later entry) as both games manage to manipulate you the player simply by letting you do what you do best: play games. I’ll cover this in more depth when I get around to writing about by 9:05 but essentially while you’re running around doing what the levels demand of you, you are in fact playing into the game’s hands. You utter fool!

An Era of Storytelling?

To tell you the truth I hope that in 9 years time we’re not still talking about BioShock in the way we still talk about Half-Life. If we are then it probably means that quality story telling in games is still as rare as it’s always been. I want developers to learn from this, I want them to see that BioShock’s been a massive critical and commercial success and understand why. Sadly I suspect what we’ll get instead is a load of FPS games with plasmid like magic powers over the next year or two each as hollow as the last and once again story will be an afterthought, little more than Parmesan cheese on top of your Carbonara.

To wrap up, if you’ve got a 360 or have access to one you should be playing BioShock and let’s face it I’m wasting my breath because you’ve probably already finished it by now anyway. If not though and even if you’re not into stories in games, and yet have still somehow got this far into one of my blog posts, it’s still worth you playing it. They’ve got just about everything right in this game and while it would be impossible for it to really live up to the hype being shoveled on it it’s still a great shooter title.

For my inaugural post I thought I’d start with something I call a “game focus” where I’ll be looking at a specific title that has mixed interaction with story telling and I’ll be talking about interesting ways in which that title has succeded or failed. Today this is going to be the recent DS game called Hotel Dusk: Room 215 which a couple of my friends picked up for me as a birthday present. It’s another adventure title for Nintendo’s beautiful little hand held and I’m not really going to review or spoil the game for you, if you’re looking for a review you could try worse places than Eurogamer. If you want to know what I thought for some bizarre reason I won’t keep you in suspense, despite numerous frustrating issues I really enjoyed it.

Hotel Dusk: Room 215 has nice graphics, some pleasant smooth Jazz tunes and an interface that for the most part works. Use of the DS as a platform is again mostly fine if a little gimmicky and to be honest it could be ported to any console without losing much. However all these typical hallmarks of gaming aren’t where the strengths and weaknesses of Hotel Dusk lie.

Free vs Linear

For my money the single biggest drag factor here is a problem as old as adventure gaming, and that’s how to pace a rigidly linear story in an interactive environment. Unless I’ve missed something obvious you’ve only got two real approaches to this problem:

• Free Exploration - You can let the player explore the environment freely and only allow relevant story sequences to occur when the right puzzles have been solved.
• Linear Flow - You put obstacles in the player’s way so they can only explore a small part of the environment initially and open up more areas to explore and trigger story sequences as they solve puzzles. This is sometimes known as a locked door puzzle since that’s the form they often take.

The best story games employ a subtle and spicy mixture of both approaches. Whether you’re talking about classic adventure games like Monkey Island, epic RPGs like Final Fantasy or a spot of survival horror in Silent Hill you’ll generally find you start off in a nice explorable area with a variety of things to do, and as you progress more areas will be opened up. I know it all sounds very obvious but you’ve got to admire how well good designers hide this. Finally buying that first ship in Monkey Island was the end of quite an epic series of puzzles but under the surface it was just another locked door puzzle used to evenly pace the narrative.

Getting back on topic, considering the setting of Hotel Dusk you might have suspicions of the method they employ. However although Hotel Dusk does have many a locked door they’re not generally puzzles and actually it employs once of the worst open exploring pacing mechanisms I’ve ever seen. You can explore most of the hotel from the very start of the game, but pretty much the only thing you can ever do is the singular story event you’re expected to do next. I can’t emphasise enough exactly how rigid this is: nobody will answer their doors, the rare staff member in the corridors will be too busy to talk you, and even items you will eventually need to complete the game can’t be picked up until it’s time for you to do so. It often feels like walking alone around an empty and possibly haunted building.

And All That Could Have Been

I actually don’t understand how the game made it to market like this, because as I’ve already said this is not a new problem and there are so many good examples out there of how to get it right. Here’s a couple of ways I think they could have sorted this mess out:

• Plot Threads - The game has many plot threads, which are often only loosely related. They should have allowed the player to advance multiple threads at the same time depending on who they talked to.
• Non-Story Dialogue - The hotel guests should engage in more trivial banter when you don’t need to talk to them instead of just rudely ignoring your knocks until they’re ready to reveal the next piece of exposition.
• Items - There really is no excuse for the way they deal with items. The building is full of objects that are just part of the scenery and since it doesn’t allow you to pick up most items until they’re the solution for the puzzle you’re currently working on you’ve no real way of knowing if your current predicament can be solved by grabbing one of the hundreds of things your character refused to bother with earlier.
• Instant Death - Slightly off topic but when grilling hotel guests as you reach the climax of their story lines you’re asked to basically make a series of informed guesses on their motives. Getting a single one of these hunches wrong is an instant game over. I’m not sure how they thought this could be fun, a bad idea that should have been ditched.

So there you have it, nothing too spectacular but I know those changes would have made it a much less frustrating experience.

Play It Anyway

So having covered its biggest design flaws you might recall I said at the start that I like the game. This is partly due to the game’s incredibly charming style throughout. The backgrounds often look like unfinished watercolours and the characters are presented as animated sketch cutouts. However the real victory here is the story and especially the characters. Each of them feels fully fleshed out, with complex emotions and rich back stories. The actual main story thrust is a homage to noir history and is largely a MacGuffin to bring out interactions with the various hotel guests until they each reveal their secrets.

I don’t want to gush on about the story too much but it’s the mature intelligent story telling that kept me coming back night after night until I finished the game. So while the story interaction can at times feel horribly frustrating I always came away with a smile on my face. It’s for this reason that I do believe Hotel Dusk deserves all the critical success it has had, and the commercial success I somehow doubt it received. Sadly though I am still left wondering how much better it could have been with some fairly obvious design changes, and also reminded that game designers often still stubbornly refuse to learn from what has gone before.