The Corpse Brigadier

Hotel Dusk: Room 215 (2007, DS) -- Beat it! In conclusion: the localization is great, the rotoscoped character animations are very charming, and the plot is something you might, indeed, have encountered in some subdued 1970s crime movie or novel (i.e. not "realistic," but realism-adjacent). On the other hand, the actual gameplay experience of "wander around and touch things until you trigger a game-advancing scene" is deeply tedious; even with a walkthrough in hand, I found much of the game to be pointlessly boring. Much like The World Ends With You, this game goes to great lengths to use every little feature of the Nintendo DS's hardware -- but while I was delighted by the surprising and delightful gameplay twists in The World Ends With You, I thought Hotel Dusk's puzzles were a dutiful slog. Additionally, the game demonstrates an almost insultingly low opinion of its player's ability to follow the plot. Reading-comprehension quizzes at the end of each chapter require you to remember characters you encountered five minutes prior.

As I wrote in sibling chat: I had not remembered the ending reveal that your ex-partner, whom you previously shot, had lured you to Hotel Dusk by secretly hiring you to find a pornographic magazine so that he could send you on an elaborate scavenger hunt that would indirectly reveal that he had previously been hanging out at the hospital bedside of a comatose girl in order to assassinate her father. However, I do find the Hyde/Bradley folie à deux to be strange enough to be interesting; that relationship isn't paint-by-numbers. As already noted, I love Louis and would die for Louis; he is the best part of the game. (Which is lucky for me, because he's in 90% of the game.) Mila continued to be a wide-eyed nineteen-year-old baby throughout the whole plot, which was deeply irritating in a game with so many colorful and interesting female characters. Nothing outrageous happens in the plot, but there's a lot of moments that test your suspension of disbelief if you linger too long on them. Why...why would Person A write a letter to Person B in which they included the secret identity of Person B in an encrypted postscript? And then why would Person B, who already knows their own secret identity, keep that letter right next to an encryption machine? And then why would that encryption machine be next to a piece of paper with the encryption-machine-decoding number written on it...in invisible ink? What is Person B's workflow like? Are they just like, "Okay, time to remind myself about my secret identity, just gonna sit down at this proto-computer for a little typing with my blacklight in hand?" (Maybe this is why Hyde is slowly suffocating during this whole scene, because the game pointedly does not want you to dwell too long on this weird tableau.)

In conclusion: eh! I can see why this game made such a splash in 2007. It's very distinct from the rest of the Nintendo DS library, and if you were an Ace Attorney sicko, this game scratched the same itch while still being original and different. I think it's worth playing if you're a fan of mystery/deduction games, as it's a notable historical novelty of the genre. On the whole, I enjoyed it -- if nothing else, Louis! -- but mostly from an antiquarian angle. It's not a game I'd recommend to the broad public.

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (2019/2021, PC) -- You're a cop (right?) investigating a murder (probably?) in a border space that exists in uneasy equilibrium between Labor and Capital. Kim Kitsuragi, your unflappable new partner, tries to steer your unhinged energies.



I'm going into this game mostly blind, which is a fun experience. I'm playing the main character as a creature with lots of empathy, zero impulse control, and a pathological need to please Kim Kitsuragi. I have already popped the sorry-cop and commie-cop achievements on Steam. After about ten hours, I'm on Day 2, and I have succeeded in getting the corpse down from the tree and autopsied. This means that Kim, my little superego, has now left me for the rest of the day so that he can bring the body back to the authorities. Time to take a lot of drugs and commit some crimes!