I’m definitely liking the DS. It’s eminently portable, being pocket-sized even in jeans (if admittedly only just in that circumstance), yet it has good enough graphics to look really nice in the amount of screen real estate available. Plus, there are a lot of fun small games to play on it. It’s no wonder it’s selling so well, really. I played such a game in various bits of free time over the last few weeks. Hotel Dusk tells the story of a down and out ex-cop consumed by his quest for answers about the fateful day when he shot his turncoat partner. In his day job as a door-to-door salesman, he washes up at a shabby hotel in Los Angeles which holds all of the answers he seeks, and the answers for a few other people besides.

It’s a fun game, but having reached the end of it, I’m left with the conclusion that the best way to describe it is ‘not enough’. The side characters wandering the hotel (with the notable exceptions of bellhop with a criminal past Louie and little girl without a mother Melissa) just aren’t quite interesting or entertaining enough. Their stories don’t have quite enough depth, especially chick with a missing sister and who may or may not be a pre-Maxim model Iris and maid who is estranged from her son Rosa. The solved mystery, though itself reasonably compelling, doesn’t lead to an entirely satisfactory conclusion. The leaps of logic that you are required to make (and which sometimes can result in the game ending upon failure) waver between way too easy and choosing blindly. The puzzles to be solved are often fun, but sometimes result in frustration if you’re trying to solve them too early or if you’re trying to do the right thing but in the wrong way. (I maintain that a flathead screwdriver would be an easy tool to use to fix a partially unspooled cassette.)

That said, most of my complaints didn’t materialize until right at the end, when so much had seemed undone. The noir thing was pretty cool, and like I said, there were certainly genuinely compelling characters. And I liked the book aspect of it. There was a lot more reading than playing, but with a better story and better characters, I would be down with that. And the part where you hold the DS in book orientation and look back and forth as the characters speak and react to each other? That was just cool. Not cool enough to make up for the flaws in the game, but definitely cool enough to play through the next DS novel that comes out. It occurs to me that we are officially one step closer to the holodeck.