Level Design - Hotel Dusk

Hotel Dusk is a criminally underrated graphic novel for the DS. It's lack luster sells means alot of people missed a great, complicated, interesting, unique playable novel about Kyle Hyde, an ex police detective in the seventies, who know works as someone who finds things and sells things.  He is sent to the Hotel Dusk and finds out that, for some reason, it is incredibly tied to his own past.  There is a sequel, but Nintendo decided against localizing it for the US so it was only released in Japan and Europe.  Fortunately the DS doesn't have any regional software so go import it!

Okay, moving on,

Hotel Dusk is distinguished visually due to it's use of Rotoscoping for it's visuals.  What this means is they record someone actually doing the action (holding an item, turning around, playing pool, whatever) and then draw over it.  This technique has been used before (the character of Snow White is rotoscoped for the movie) but it isn't always so sketchy.  However, it fits with the game.  The game is filled with black, white, and gray.  Life attempts to be simple.   And the backgrounds don't stand out.

It's an interesting style for an interesting game.  I just wish more people recognized it.


(As a side note: if this blog is shut down by SOPA, I hope you enjoyed reading it.)