Hotel Dusk: Room 215

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Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is a single-player point-and-click adventure game for the Nintendo DS. It’s known in Japan as Wish Room: Angel’s Memory. The game was developed by the now-closed Cing and published by Nintendo. It debuted at E3 2006 and released in North America on January 22, 2007, with subsequent releases in Japan, Australia, Europe, and Korea. It also supports the DS’s Rumble Pak and was re-released in 2008 as part of the Touch! Generations line.

You play as Kyle Hyde, a former New York City detective who now works as a salesman, as he searches for his missing partner, Brian Bradley. The story unfolds in a small Los Angeles hotel called Hotel Dusk, focusing on Room 215, a place rumored to grant wishes. Hyde uncovers a web of connected mysteries involving art forgery, kidnappings, a murder, and a criminal group known as Nile.

Gameplay uses the DS touch screen, microphone, and the device’s clamshell design. The game is played with the DS rotated 90 degrees, like a book, and you move Hyde around a hotel map using either the touch screen or the D-pad while a first-person 3D view appears on the other screen. Much of the game involves talking to staff and guests, examining items, and solving puzzles through simple touch-screen tasks. You can ask questions about items and topics you’ve learned about; choosing the right questions advances the story, while asking wrong questions or breaking rules can lead to a game over or a failure to progress. A central feature is Hyde’s journal, where you can jot notes on three pages, with key clues copied automatically.

Development took about a year and a half with a team of about 20 people. The creators aimed for a distinctive visual style and used rotoscoped animation to give characters a lifelike feel. Backgrounds are drawn in a brushwork style, and the game blends two-dimensional art with three-dimensional objects. Much of the character design was influenced by the actors who played them.

Hotel Dusk received generally favorable reviews. It performed well in Japan, selling over 213,000 copies in 2007 and earning a place on lists of notable games from that year. Critics praised its writing and atmosphere, though some noted the puzzles could be simple or that the game felt linear. A retrospective from Kotaku highlighted the strong writing and surprising character motivations. A sequel, Last Window: The Secret of Cape West, was released in 2010 for the DS in Japan and Europe (not released in North America due to Cing’s bankruptcy) and is set in Los Angeles in 1980, one year after Hotel Dusk.