Importantly, these chats, while overly long and madly frustrating in their inability to be sped up, provide a depth of character so devastatingly missing from most games. Chat for a bit, then some chatting, solve a child's jigsaw puzzle, and then have a bit of a chat. It seems, by peculiar circumstances, that so many people in the hotel are linked to each other, and in turn, linked to Bradley. In fact, it's always motivated by Hyde's driving goal, to find his former partner, Bradley, missing for the past three years. Hyde really only wants to get his job done and go home, so it's with a depth of reluctance that you start sniffing into people's pasts and presents. The hotel has a number of guests, and a few staff, all of whom have stories to tell, and secrets to hide. Later on, Rachel on the right is mostly in colour. Cing have opted for the latter, and as such everything is taken very seriously.

Dusk is about noir, its inspirations the murky detective fiction that now only exists as spoof or homage. This is Phoenix Wright levels of chatter, except with one rather important element absent: the funny. However, this is mostly due to the extraordinary amount of conversation throughout. Hotel Dusk definitely addresses the brevity issue. The DS you held existed within the game it was displaying. Reflecting one screen in the other, closing the console to print the top screen on the bottom - these were splendid ideas, lost in a trite and incredibly short story. Three superb puzzles that saw the instrument with which you played the game - a folding plastic console - playing a significant role as you interacted with the game's world. It was, I think hindsight can confess, a weak game with a few lovely ideas.

It's from the same team that created Another Code, which was rather inexplicably heralded as the great white (or black or pink, and in Japan, a sickly blue) hope for adventures on the DS. This is a story set very much in the real world, but with, well, rather a lot of coincidences. However, despite this impression, Hotel Dusk isn't going anywhere near any of that. Magical rooms, mysterious objects, peculiar characters. And with this put to you at the very start, it triggers ideas that were so beautifully explored in last year's Sci-Fi channel mini-series, The Lost Room. Sent to Hotel Dusk, Kyle finds himself booked into the Wish Room - a room, it is claimed, that will grant your wishes when you sleep there. His life is quite clearly not what it once was, and his deeply cynical attitude provides the lens through which you view the game. However, three years earlier he was a cop for the NYPD, until he was forced to, for reasons not explained until very near the end, shoot someone close to him. His jobs require not only hawking dodgy late 70s technology (as this is when the game is set), but also finding 'lost' items for clients.

Kyle Hyde (and yes, he's very proud of his name) is a door-to-door salesman by trade, but with a slightly peculiar edge to his business. Far more interesting is examining how Hotel Dusk's animated pencil sketches look without coincidental comparison, but it does at least provide a vivid reference point for those who haven't seen it running. The first thing people say when they see pointy clicky adventure Hotel Dusk is, 'That looks like the video by AHA from the 80s!' So it's the first thing I've said too, so it can be mentioned, and now forgotten.

Hotel dusk room 215