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The first time I walked through the second floor corridor of Cape West apartments – a rather dilapidated and low-budget affair, complete with bland late-70s decor and a hint of its majestic 50s past – and through to Kyle Hyde’s room, number 202, I got the distinct feeling that Last Window: The Secret of Cape West was the same old fare that Hotel Dusk was; a slow-paced, moody adventure game with a stylish art style and rotoscoped animation, well written dialogue and an interesting narrative. However, something struck me as rather different when playing through it. I got the sense that this game’s focus was slightly different from its predecessor’s.
Now don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed Hotel Dusk: Room 215, but I found the mystery surrounding the paintings and the hotel’s secrets to be rather bland.
“When does the murder happen?” a friend once asked me after I’d recommended the game.
“Um, never,” is all I could reply. “But it has good characters.”
And whilst I was right – Hotel Dusk does have good characters – I also underestimated what people’s expectations of this game’s genre were: they wanted a murder mystery, and nothing but cracking the case and catching a cold-blooded killer would do. In some way, I kind of felt the same. The characters’ development through Kyle’s investigation was an unforgettable gaming experience, but it’s just a shame that the mystery itself was rather disappointing, if hard to predict.
Last Window is very different from that. Cutting straight to the chase of a murder mystery, it never stops making you wonder about the various killers, starting with details of an incident twenty five years prior, and culminating in the discovery of a lost gem, its location in the building as mysterious as the identity of the murderers.
Well, at least until around chapter 8 (of 10), at which point you seem to get most of the answers you’re after, and the game takes a turn towards pinning the crimes on those responsible, as opposed to just having a gut feeling that they were the ones who did it. Needless to say, the intrigue up until that point is far more gripping and gives the game a stronger narrative focus than Hotel Dusk‘s loose strands slowly coming together to culminate in a great reveal. Last Window definitely has a far more satisfying plot.
However, for all the intrigue and mystery that it contains, compared to Hotel Dusk, Last Window takes a step back with its characters. About the only character who developed in any meaningful way was protagonist Kyle Hyde, whilst the rest of them feel like caricatures of the original cast: Tony is like Loius, Mags is pretty much a female version of Dunning and Sydney is like Rosa, only without the interesting back story.
These disappointing characters feel like the writers wanted to hark back to what made Hotel Dusk special, only they lose a lot of the charm and feel rather like two dimensional impersonators, which is a shame considering the far more gripping mystery is there this time. Maybe that was the trade off. Personally, I’d take the characters, but I’m sure many of this game’s potential audience would disagree.
For anyone who has played Hotel Dusk, the gameplay of Last Window will be all too familiar. Holding the DS like a book, players navigate the building in an incredibly linear puzzle adventure, talking to characters, asking them questions and digging into their dark past. As with the first time, attention will be focussed on the touch screen, which is a map of the environments that you can explore. Tapping the stylus on screen moves Kyle in the direction that it’s placed.
On the other screen is a 3D representation of what Kyle sees in front of him. For a system not known for its graphical prowess, the environments in Last Window still look rather good on the DS’s screen, if a little blocky. Which is a big shame really, considering most of your time will be spent looking at the other screen; you’ll only get to feel the game’s atmosphere in conversation or when you’re examining items and areas, as this is the only time 3D graphics and touch controls are combined.
With little wiggle room to tackle problems in your own order (save for ten or twenty minutes of selling some of Red Crown’s tacky wares), a sizable chunk of the game feels like you’re being ordered from area to area with little choice in the matter. If you try to deviate at all, the game will rebuke you with nobody answering the doors if you knock on them, or having areas plainly blocked off by Kyle “not wanting” or “needing” to be there, or sometimes brutally with a Game Over. This might lead players to wonder where the challenge or the fun is, and for that Cing answered with puzzles.
Just like Hotel Dusk, Last Window makes full use of the DS’s features. Touch screen, buttons, microphone and even the open and shut mechanism. Some puzzles require you to take notes, whilst others require you blow into the microphone to clear dust off of something, or to shut the DS and open it again to open and close a box.
Overall, it feels like a re-run of the original’s puzzles, complete with them being deceptively simple enough to make you feel stupid after you’ve solved them. One such puzzle, on an elevator, kept me up until 2am one morning trying to solve it. After sleeping on it, I worked it out in a matter of minutes, but that didn’t stop me from feeling rather sheepish afterwards.
Last Window‘s puzzles are also quite memorable, so you won’t be forgetting them if decide you replay the game again, which will lead to diminished replay value. However, at 13-15 hours on your first play through, it isn’t a short game, and most players won’t feel like they’re wanting for more at the end.
With Cing, Last Window’s developer, now long gone, it seems appropriate that they managed to get one more Kyle Hyde game out before going under. For me it was easily my favourite series of theirs, and for them to go out with Last Window is somewhat of a love letter, or swan song, to the very few fans who stuck by them and bought all their DS games.
If you enjoyed Hotel Dusk or Another Code: R on the Wii, you’ll certainly like Last Window. Similarly, if you quite like adventures, or want a change of pace from the barrage of titles that up the ante, action and pace with each iteration, you could do far worse than Last Window.
Chris would like to apologise for having not written on Bitmob for a while. He's been busy filling in a JET application, and playing Dead Rising 2, Halo: Reach and Last Window, of course. If you want to get in touch, harass him on Twitter: @akwinters