Review: Hotel Dusk, + gratuitous picspam
Finished Hotel Dusk: Room 215 this morning! AND IT WAS AWESOME.
For anyone who's not at all familiar with it, Hotel Dusk is essentially an interactive detective novel. You play as Kyle Hyde, an ex-cop now in the business of finding things that people want found, and at the start of the game you check into Hotel Dusk, a cheap, faded, run-down hotel in the arse end of nowhere. At this point, Kyle's been looking for an ex-partner (the work kind, although I have to say the line is, as is often the case, a fine one) of his, Bradley, who betrayed him a while back and then disappeared, in the hope of finding out why Bradley did what he did, and he soon finds that all the guests in the hotel are similarly laden with baggage. The game takes place over the course of one evening and night in the hotel (not real-time; passage of in-game time is triggered), and involves pretty much three basic gameplay mechanics: little touch-screen puzzles, point-and-click-style USE pencil ON plug socket stuff, and choose-your-own-adventure-ish conversation sections, where you have to pick the questions or responses that will make people talk to you and not throw you out on your ear. Through working your way through these tasks and puzzles, you gradually reveal more and more of a narrative of events that ties together Kyle, the skeletons in his closet, the hotel, and almost all its guests.
It started off on the right foot with me, then, because I'm an absolute sucker for stories about hotels. Hotels are such resonant places, both in the sense that so many lives and stories have passed through them, and in the sense that there are so many separate narratives and events and experiences converging and mingling in them at any given time. When they're expensive and opulent, the sensuality and glamour of them is intoxicating; when they're seedy and sordid and decaying, all peeling wallpaper and thin walls and ugly carpet and suspicious-looking bedlinen, well, I like them all the more. Hotel Dusk really delivers as a hotel story. The design of the hotel itself is incredibly evocative; definitely a place in the latter mould, it's an eyesore of dull, windowless corridors, vile paintings, tacky fittings and desperate attempts to recapture some kind of probably non-existent heyday of glamour and activity - which is a perfect backdrop for all the stories of loss, frustration, cynicism and bitterness that the game lets you chase up and unravel as you explore it.
I also have a great fondness for detective stories, which I don't indulge nearly as often as I should. And again, the backbone of this game is a great, great detective story. It manages to pull off twists that are genuinely surprising without seeming cheap or like they came completely out of left-field, and the end-game has that pleasing jigsaw-like quality, the sort of neatness and flourish in the resolution that makes you go OH I get it. And impressively, although the plot rests on a huge number of coincidences, it manages to avoid contrivance; it helps, I think, that it has one very strong core plot, involving only a handful of the characters, and that many of the other guests' stories are tied into it only tangentially. The very end-ending was a little soft, and the closing scene seemed to raise more problems than it was likely to solve, but the denouement proper was tough and involving enough to make up for it.
My favourite thing about detective stories, though, is the characters - done wrong, they become caricatures: hard-boiled cops, streetwise punks, ingenues, vamps, tough old ladies, abusive husbands, cute smart-ass kids; done right, and there's so much pain, loneliness, resilience, conflict, hope, for you to wring pathos out of. Pretty much every single character in Hotel Dusk has that latter kind of depth and vividness, as do the complicated, awkward, often highly-charged relationships between them, and they're just so damn engaging. They're engaging to the point where you become absorbed in and carried along with their moods: when Kyle took a break and sat with Louis at the bar, drinking the vintage whisky Louis dug out for him, I felt myself relaxing and smiling as they did; when you learn that smart, lonely, sad little Melissa's dad never bothered to do Christmas this year, I felt that "oh god how can I help you" that Kyle does. The strength and range and complexity of their emotions leaps off the screen at you and drags you in, which is quite an achievement considering all the game has to work with is text dialogue and a handful of facial animations.
And of all of them, hands down I love Kyle best. Oh, do I love Kyle. What an absolutely astonishingly well-developed and sympathetic protagonist, and what an utter joy he is to play as. He's the nearest thing the game has to a narrator, as all the commentary on events that pass and objects &c. that you examine is filtered through his internal monologue, and his voice is dry, sharp, sardonic, and genuinely funny. He is stubborn to a fault, stoic and guarded about his own feelings and secrets, yet endlessly, endlessly generous when it comes to listening to other people and helping them, even as he tries to seem hard-nosed and cold-hearted. He can be clever and he can be charming, and he can also be a total, total loser. Cruelty, unfairness and cowardice all make him incredibly angry, and he isn't afraid to stand up for people and to people and tell them exactly what he thinks of them. He is infuriating and useless and pitiable and lovable and admirable and sympathetic all in equal measures, and I loved every second of time I spent with him.
What struck me about the game, though, as I came to the end of it this morning, is that most of my love for it comes from my academic geekery place rather than my fangirl place. I think I could talk about its characters and narrative and setting until the cows come home, but in terms of the creative, fic-rather-than-meta side of fandom - it's not pushing my buttons. For one thing, the game is already giving me what I'd normally want from fic; although I can see incredible romance in the way Kyle relates not only to the absent Bradley, but also to Louis, I'm quite happy to leave it at that intensely romantic homosocial level (perhaps partly because unusually in a story with such vividly drawn male-male relationships, Kyle actually has chemistry with women, and when I say women I mean Rachel, who is sexy and flirtatious and generally delightful and I absolutely buy her and Kyle's flirting, it's lovely). Even trying to figure out why I'm not feeling the fic urge is activating my fan studies brain - there's a blog post by Henry Jenkins knocking around somewhere, that suggests a typology of features in a text that encourage people to read and write fanfiction, and to a great extent Hotel Dusk doesn't really have them. Pretty much all the loose ends it introduces it ties up, and in a very coherent, organically satisfying way. All I'm feeling I'd want to write is something like a novelisation of the game, something that puts words to things like the futility, naivety and youth of Jeff's ridiculous rebellion, or the tragedy and pathos in Iris's struggles to maintain her poise and facade of stature while being so utterly lost, all those things that emerge from the game but are never articulated. But at the same time, I feel that would kind of take away from what makes this game so wonderful - which brings me to the main way in which it pushes my academic buttons, and probably the main thing that I love it for.
There is nothing revolutionary about the gameplay alone in Hotel Dusk. Despite me somehow managing to cock up the final room escape puzzle in a spectacular number and variety of ways, the puzzles are consistently easy (and this is speaking as someone who is staggeringly bad at anything that resembles a point and click adventure, mostly because, like Kyle, I am incredibly stubborn and will not let an idea for solving a puzzle go even when it's been proved to be wrong), and the game is too dependent on you triggering particular events in order to progress. What makes me jump up and down in flaily excitement about it, though, is that it is a shining example of how to integrate narrative and gameplay. If you want to use games to tell stories, you could do much, much worse than to look to Hotel Dusk - every bit of its gameplay enhances the power and effect of its narrative. The interactivity, the fact that you control Kyle, you are the one who chooses where he goes, who investigates every room with painstaking thoroughness, who has to stop and think and really take the time to figure out, based on everything you've found out so far and all the clues you have, where you should go next and who you need to talk to and what the best line of questioning is to take with any given character, amplifies both the build-ups and the pay-offs of the detective story to great effect. And the fact that each story is not told through the filter of a narrator, but rather purely in dialogue, and hence in the relevant character's own words, is yet another powerful strategy of immersion; it places you in the position of Kyle, sitting in a bar or someone else's room, standing in a corridor or a door frame or a private office, listening to these people tell you their life stories.
Hotel Dusk makes me want to write essays about it (I may or may not already have plans for a serious scholarly article on it ¬_¬), and that's a huge compliment to it. I honestly can't recommend it highly enough; you should all go and play it - and then come back and join me in tl;dr-ing about it :D
Not much to report RL-wise, at the moment. My thesis-brain is working at 100% efficiency, but my ability to sit down and actually concentrate on anything has flown out of the window. Conversely, I am finding myself with both the time and the inclination to sit down and get some creative writing done, and yet cannot muster up any inspiration whatsoever. Not even the idea of an AA lesbian boarding school AU has been able to break my fiction-writer's block. Normally, these two things combined would put me into the kind of stress and misery that would have me paralysed with depressive episodes whenever I'm left on my own and crying at the drop of a hat whenever I'm with other people; in a (for the most part successful) effort to stop this from happening, I've written a week of work off and spent it relaxing with Hazel and Sis, getting into a routine of swimming, and going on Very Long Walks along the local coastline.
Being by the sea always has a very profound effect on me. Part of it is sensitivity to all the social and cultural resonances that coastal towns and cities have, whether historic ports like Liverpool, or seaside towns like Blackpool, with all the weight of the past and all the fading, disaffectedness of the present sitting on them. Mostly, though, it's a purely sensory thing. I always feel an incredible clarity of contentment when I can look out over water, and feel sea winds, and listen to waves - a kind of physical relaxation that overrides my usually indefatigable propensity for overthinking. Which ties in, I think, with something else that makes me happy when I go to the sea - the fact that the people there are there purely for the sake of being in and enjoying that natural environment, of just being in sunshine and clean winds and natural beauty for an afternoon. It's living for the sake of living, and I like seeing that from time to time.
I'm not feeling all that good with words at the moment, so in the light of previous comments about photography, have a photo essay instead - a week of afternoons on the beaches, cliff-tops, waterfronts and sandstone walls of the Wirral coastline, looking out over the sands, the marine lakes and the marshes of the Dee estuary.
For anyone who's not at all familiar with it, Hotel Dusk is essentially an interactive detective novel. You play as Kyle Hyde, an ex-cop now in the business of finding things that people want found, and at the start of the game you check into Hotel Dusk, a cheap, faded, run-down hotel in the arse end of nowhere. At this point, Kyle's been looking for an ex-partner (the work kind, although I have to say the line is, as is often the case, a fine one) of his, Bradley, who betrayed him a while back and then disappeared, in the hope of finding out why Bradley did what he did, and he soon finds that all the guests in the hotel are similarly laden with baggage. The game takes place over the course of one evening and night in the hotel (not real-time; passage of in-game time is triggered), and involves pretty much three basic gameplay mechanics: little touch-screen puzzles, point-and-click-style USE pencil ON plug socket stuff, and choose-your-own-adventure-ish conversation sections, where you have to pick the questions or responses that will make people talk to you and not throw you out on your ear. Through working your way through these tasks and puzzles, you gradually reveal more and more of a narrative of events that ties together Kyle, the skeletons in his closet, the hotel, and almost all its guests.
It started off on the right foot with me, then, because I'm an absolute sucker for stories about hotels. Hotels are such resonant places, both in the sense that so many lives and stories have passed through them, and in the sense that there are so many separate narratives and events and experiences converging and mingling in them at any given time. When they're expensive and opulent, the sensuality and glamour of them is intoxicating; when they're seedy and sordid and decaying, all peeling wallpaper and thin walls and ugly carpet and suspicious-looking bedlinen, well, I like them all the more. Hotel Dusk really delivers as a hotel story. The design of the hotel itself is incredibly evocative; definitely a place in the latter mould, it's an eyesore of dull, windowless corridors, vile paintings, tacky fittings and desperate attempts to recapture some kind of probably non-existent heyday of glamour and activity - which is a perfect backdrop for all the stories of loss, frustration, cynicism and bitterness that the game lets you chase up and unravel as you explore it.
I also have a great fondness for detective stories, which I don't indulge nearly as often as I should. And again, the backbone of this game is a great, great detective story. It manages to pull off twists that are genuinely surprising without seeming cheap or like they came completely out of left-field, and the end-game has that pleasing jigsaw-like quality, the sort of neatness and flourish in the resolution that makes you go OH I get it. And impressively, although the plot rests on a huge number of coincidences, it manages to avoid contrivance; it helps, I think, that it has one very strong core plot, involving only a handful of the characters, and that many of the other guests' stories are tied into it only tangentially. The very end-ending was a little soft, and the closing scene seemed to raise more problems than it was likely to solve, but the denouement proper was tough and involving enough to make up for it.
My favourite thing about detective stories, though, is the characters - done wrong, they become caricatures: hard-boiled cops, streetwise punks, ingenues, vamps, tough old ladies, abusive husbands, cute smart-ass kids; done right, and there's so much pain, loneliness, resilience, conflict, hope, for you to wring pathos out of. Pretty much every single character in Hotel Dusk has that latter kind of depth and vividness, as do the complicated, awkward, often highly-charged relationships between them, and they're just so damn engaging. They're engaging to the point where you become absorbed in and carried along with their moods: when Kyle took a break and sat with Louis at the bar, drinking the vintage whisky Louis dug out for him, I felt myself relaxing and smiling as they did; when you learn that smart, lonely, sad little Melissa's dad never bothered to do Christmas this year, I felt that "oh god how can I help you" that Kyle does. The strength and range and complexity of their emotions leaps off the screen at you and drags you in, which is quite an achievement considering all the game has to work with is text dialogue and a handful of facial animations.
And of all of them, hands down I love Kyle best. Oh, do I love Kyle. What an absolutely astonishingly well-developed and sympathetic protagonist, and what an utter joy he is to play as. He's the nearest thing the game has to a narrator, as all the commentary on events that pass and objects &c. that you examine is filtered through his internal monologue, and his voice is dry, sharp, sardonic, and genuinely funny. He is stubborn to a fault, stoic and guarded about his own feelings and secrets, yet endlessly, endlessly generous when it comes to listening to other people and helping them, even as he tries to seem hard-nosed and cold-hearted. He can be clever and he can be charming, and he can also be a total, total loser. Cruelty, unfairness and cowardice all make him incredibly angry, and he isn't afraid to stand up for people and to people and tell them exactly what he thinks of them. He is infuriating and useless and pitiable and lovable and admirable and sympathetic all in equal measures, and I loved every second of time I spent with him.
What struck me about the game, though, as I came to the end of it this morning, is that most of my love for it comes from my academic geekery place rather than my fangirl place. I think I could talk about its characters and narrative and setting until the cows come home, but in terms of the creative, fic-rather-than-meta side of fandom - it's not pushing my buttons. For one thing, the game is already giving me what I'd normally want from fic; although I can see incredible romance in the way Kyle relates not only to the absent Bradley, but also to Louis, I'm quite happy to leave it at that intensely romantic homosocial level (perhaps partly because unusually in a story with such vividly drawn male-male relationships, Kyle actually has chemistry with women, and when I say women I mean Rachel, who is sexy and flirtatious and generally delightful and I absolutely buy her and Kyle's flirting, it's lovely). Even trying to figure out why I'm not feeling the fic urge is activating my fan studies brain - there's a blog post by Henry Jenkins knocking around somewhere, that suggests a typology of features in a text that encourage people to read and write fanfiction, and to a great extent Hotel Dusk doesn't really have them. Pretty much all the loose ends it introduces it ties up, and in a very coherent, organically satisfying way. All I'm feeling I'd want to write is something like a novelisation of the game, something that puts words to things like the futility, naivety and youth of Jeff's ridiculous rebellion, or the tragedy and pathos in Iris's struggles to maintain her poise and facade of stature while being so utterly lost, all those things that emerge from the game but are never articulated. But at the same time, I feel that would kind of take away from what makes this game so wonderful - which brings me to the main way in which it pushes my academic buttons, and probably the main thing that I love it for.
There is nothing revolutionary about the gameplay alone in Hotel Dusk. Despite me somehow managing to cock up the final room escape puzzle in a spectacular number and variety of ways, the puzzles are consistently easy (and this is speaking as someone who is staggeringly bad at anything that resembles a point and click adventure, mostly because, like Kyle, I am incredibly stubborn and will not let an idea for solving a puzzle go even when it's been proved to be wrong), and the game is too dependent on you triggering particular events in order to progress. What makes me jump up and down in flaily excitement about it, though, is that it is a shining example of how to integrate narrative and gameplay. If you want to use games to tell stories, you could do much, much worse than to look to Hotel Dusk - every bit of its gameplay enhances the power and effect of its narrative. The interactivity, the fact that you control Kyle, you are the one who chooses where he goes, who investigates every room with painstaking thoroughness, who has to stop and think and really take the time to figure out, based on everything you've found out so far and all the clues you have, where you should go next and who you need to talk to and what the best line of questioning is to take with any given character, amplifies both the build-ups and the pay-offs of the detective story to great effect. And the fact that each story is not told through the filter of a narrator, but rather purely in dialogue, and hence in the relevant character's own words, is yet another powerful strategy of immersion; it places you in the position of Kyle, sitting in a bar or someone else's room, standing in a corridor or a door frame or a private office, listening to these people tell you their life stories.
Hotel Dusk makes me want to write essays about it (I may or may not already have plans for a serious scholarly article on it ¬_¬), and that's a huge compliment to it. I honestly can't recommend it highly enough; you should all go and play it - and then come back and join me in tl;dr-ing about it :D
Not much to report RL-wise, at the moment. My thesis-brain is working at 100% efficiency, but my ability to sit down and actually concentrate on anything has flown out of the window. Conversely, I am finding myself with both the time and the inclination to sit down and get some creative writing done, and yet cannot muster up any inspiration whatsoever. Not even the idea of an AA lesbian boarding school AU has been able to break my fiction-writer's block. Normally, these two things combined would put me into the kind of stress and misery that would have me paralysed with depressive episodes whenever I'm left on my own and crying at the drop of a hat whenever I'm with other people; in a (for the most part successful) effort to stop this from happening, I've written a week of work off and spent it relaxing with Hazel and Sis, getting into a routine of swimming, and going on Very Long Walks along the local coastline.
Being by the sea always has a very profound effect on me. Part of it is sensitivity to all the social and cultural resonances that coastal towns and cities have, whether historic ports like Liverpool, or seaside towns like Blackpool, with all the weight of the past and all the fading, disaffectedness of the present sitting on them. Mostly, though, it's a purely sensory thing. I always feel an incredible clarity of contentment when I can look out over water, and feel sea winds, and listen to waves - a kind of physical relaxation that overrides my usually indefatigable propensity for overthinking. Which ties in, I think, with something else that makes me happy when I go to the sea - the fact that the people there are there purely for the sake of being in and enjoying that natural environment, of just being in sunshine and clean winds and natural beauty for an afternoon. It's living for the sake of living, and I like seeing that from time to time.
I'm not feeling all that good with words at the moment, so in the light of previous comments about photography, have a photo essay instead - a week of afternoons on the beaches, cliff-tops, waterfronts and sandstone walls of the Wirral coastline, looking out over the sands, the marine lakes and the marshes of the Dee estuary.