Locked Door Puzzle

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.