GREAT game so far. I picked it up today after following it for the past year or so and double-checking the initial reviews to make sure that there wasn’t some heinous deal-breaker in the execution (like the eagerly-awaited but horrible Touch Detective).
I’m a sucker for old-school-style adventure games of the Gabriel Knight and Seventh Guest mold, and I loved Trace Memory for the DS, so I was eagerly awaiting this.
It’s really great so far, rendered in a sort of “moving comic book”-style (think that old eighties video for A-Ha’s “take on me”), and absolutely oozes a killer seventies california noir vibe. Holding the DS like a book (sideways) and using the stylus to interact with things on the screen, explore the hotel, and choose different conversatin topics and branches is completely natural and intuitive. Wonderful.
The story has me hooked so far, and there have already been some weird twists and hooks after just an hour or two of play.
One slight nitpick - there’s no way to adjust the speed that the text appears on the screen. It’s a common oversight in many RPG’s, but for a game that’s 95% text, it’s kind of a heinous exclusion. As a fast and voracious reader, it really gets on my nerves to wait as the text slooooooowly bloop-bloop-bloops and writes itself in on the screen one word at a time. But a good deal of that antsiness is my enthusiasm to further the plot and find out where the story goes.
Thumbs-up.