Welcome to Hotel Dusk

My favorite game console, a defunct developer, and a room that grants wishes

I love video games, even if I might not always play them the way they were intended to be played. Ever since I was a kid, you could catch me wandering off to find the edges of a digital map, clicking on absolutely every object in the room, or trying to exhaust all conversation possibilities with NPCs. I am the target demographic of any and all side quests, and I love a good easter egg, too.

My favorite games give the player a chance to wander around inside the world created by a story, which never gets old to me. You aren’t just an observer — you’re the spark. Without you, the story can’t unfurl.

It’s a hard choice, but my favorite console has to be the Nintendo DS, which is celebrating the twentieth anniversary of its North American release this year. The DS was notable for featuring two screens, the lower a touchscreen that came with a stylus to make things happen up top. Other features included a mic and wifi capabilities, and later models added a camera and a 3D component. (I know this sounds like small potatoes now, but in 2004 we were still about three years out from the release of the first iPhone!)

Those two screens seem to have opened up a lot of creative possibilities for game developers. As a result, the DS has some especially quirky entries in its library, alongside the more traditional Mario and Zelda adventures:

• My Stop Smoking Coach. Whatever helps people quit, I guess!

• 100 Classic Books. Deeply tempted to reread Anna Karenina on my DS, as Tolstoy intended…

• McDonald’s Training. Absolutely love imagining the alternate universe where we all train for our jobs on a custom corporate DS game.

• Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre. This interactive museum guide (which also makes use of the later model’s 3D feature) is one of my favorite discoveries, but it’s very hard to find a physical cartridge nowadays. Copies go for hundreds of dollars on eBay!

I can’t resist looking for offbeat entries in this vein whenever I find myself in a game store. It’s so cool to see how the new technology generated so many different ideas — even if some of them worked, and some of them didn’t.

But my favorite of all the games in the DS library?

Hotel Dusk.

Spotted in the wild!

Kyle Hyde used to be a police detective. Now he’s a salesman with a side gig looking for lost things that don’t want to be found.

Three years ago, Kyle found out his partner Brian Bradley was on the take and shot him during the confrontation that followed. Turns out Bradley survived, and Kyle’s been looking for him ever since. Kyle is consumed by his search, hounded by the idea that there must be something he’s missing, some piece of the puzzle he needs to uncover in order to understand why his partner betrayed him and turned his back on everything they believed in.

When Kyle shows up at Hotel Dusk on December 28, 1979, he has no idea what’s in store for him. But it’s no accident he’s assigned to 215 — a room that’s rumored to grant wishes.

From the very beginning, Hotel Dusk immerses the player not just in the world of the hotel, but the way Kyle sees it. We meet an eclectic cast of characters who have all found themselves at the hotel in that liminal space between Christmas and the new year. But how could the secrets of this hotel and its occupants possibly connect to his search for Bradley?

Story-wise, Hotel Dusk is an atmospheric noir with memorable characters and a big heart, which is enough to recommend it on its own. But one of the really ingenious things about the game is how it made use of the specific capabilities of the DS. Right at the start, the game requires you to turn the console on its side, like a book — an appropriate mode for a visual novel! The consequent puzzles further ask you to consider how you might manipulate the console itself, often in ways that go beyond merely pushing buttons.

As an example, there’s a moment in this Eurogamer piece in which Jai Singh Bains recalls being stumped by a Hotel Dusk puzzle, opting to close the DS and return later on — only to inadvertently stumble onto the solution by doing so. Physically closing the DS “flipped” its digital contents from one screen to the other. In Bains’ words, “My actions outside of the game directly affected the world inside it.” It’s out-of-the-box moments like this where Hotel Dusk really shines.

Cing, the company behind Hotel Dusk, was around for just over a decade. In that time, they made a handful of games for a few different consoles (including a sequel to Hotel Dusk called Last Window, which is also very good!) before they unfortunately went bankrupt in 2010. The above video gives a behind-the-scenes peek at their distinctive rotoscoping animation technique, which lent a ton of charm to both entries in the Kyle Hyde story. RIP Cing, I miss you every day.

Nowadays, Hotel Dusk is something of cult classic, maintaining a dedicated group of fans who still wish for Cing’s return. And for what it’s worth, we did get a spark of hope just this year!

Back in January, two popular Cing games were remade and re-released for the Nintendo Switch as Another Code: Recollection, which follows Ashley Mizuki Robins as she tries to unravel the mysteries surrounding parents she never really knew. We’ve been playing through it this month and I’ve definitely noticed a lot of similar themes — uncovering the past, setting as character — even if teenage Ashley is quite a bit different from Kyle Hyde.

Hotel Dusk really did change the way I think about the possibilities of storytelling; we’re so lucky to have had Cing around as long as we did. One can only hope that Nintendo will keep this game in mind as they continue work on their next console! (And look, Nintendo — I caught those Kyle Hyde easter eggs in Another Code. Don’t let me down!)

In publication news, a few things to share:

Short Story, Long published my first short story in a while, which is all about a girl who finds her doppelganger on the internet. Editor Aaron Burch also interviewed me about it, which ended up being a fun reminder of why I love writing fiction. Some of you found Microfascination through that story — welcome!

Over at Write or Die, I interviewed Sofia Samatar about friendship between writers, her love/hate relationship with genre, the tyranny of identity, and her new book Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life. Highly recommend this one for all writers, but particularly if you’re interested in the tensions between writing and publishing.

And finally, this issue of Microfascination is dedicated to my buddy Ringo, who was a very, very good boy.

2010 - 2024 <3