Hotel Dusk is a charming older adventure game for the Nintendo DS, featuring a very human cast brought together by some very impressive serendipity. It’s got a funky visual style for character portraits that suit the DS well, but the 3D renditions of the rooms are pretty limited by the hardware choice. The music is fantastic — sometimes truly emotional — but also limited by the DS audio crunchiness. The way of holding the DS sideways and interacting with the stylus really invokes the feeling of carrying a notebook you’re writing in, but the requirement of basically only using the touch screen ever gets tedious. At least you can also advance text by pressing the D-pad or A button.

Despite the limitations, and sometimes because of them, the vibes are immaculately vintage and immersive. Please try it if you’re at all interested in DS-era adventure games/visual novels!

Just, if you play it on anything but the original DS/DS Lite, make sure you’ve picked up a Blacklight item before diving into Chapter 10. Otherwise, you will get stuck in a very unpleasant and potentially lengthy trial-and-error section. I did not do this on a previous 3DS playthrough. A Bad Time Was Had.