Customer Reviews
OK, but it's no Hotel Dusk
Since this appears to be shaping up as the first review of this game on Amazon, I should state my biases up front. Let me be clear that I am coming at this game from the perspective of someone who really enjoyed "Hotel Dusk: Room 215" and was essentially hoping for more of the same from this game (which is by the same developer, so that didn't seem like a wholly unrealistic expectation). Regardless, if you haven't played "Hotel Dusk," large chunks of this review are probably not going to make much sense, so I apologize for that in advance.
If you'd like to save yourself some reading, here's the capsule review: If you haven't played "Hotel Dusk" and you want a really good adventure game for your DS, I'd advise getting that instead of "Again." If you have played "Hotel Dusk" and you're hoping that "Again" will be pretty much like that game was, only even better because they've had a couple of years to improve their craft, prepare for some disappointment. While "Again" is an OK game, it isn't anywhere near as good as "Hotel Dusk." In a strange way, this new game sort of feels like it should have been the old game, by which I mean, "Hotel Dusk" plays like I would expect it to play if the developer had already made "Again" and wanted to make another game to address the first game's shortcomings. Instead, it's the brand-new game that has more shortcomings compared to its predecessor, and that's disappointing. To me, "Again" is a big step backwards from "Hotel Dusk" in terms of both story and gameplay.
The most similar thing about "Again" and "Hotel Dusk" is the visual presentation. It's a distinctive style, and personally I like it a lot. The characters are presented as 2D "sketches" which look like actors who have been rendered as pencil drawings, but in "Again" they are in full color and have a much more photographic quality whereas in "Hotel Dusk" they were black-and-white and more stylized. (It also makes story sense that the characters have been upgraded from black and white to full color; "Hotel Dusk" is set in a run-down, nearly abandoned hotel during the late 1970s whereas "Again" is set in a mid-sized city in 2010.) I thought that the style worked really well in the older game and I still think it works really well in this game. There is a neat transition effect when you enter a new scene where a silhouette walks across the two screens of the DS and the background fills in behind. I never got tired of looking at the characters or the static backgrounds. In the fully-interactive 3D scenes the graphics do not try to be "photo-realistic" (which so often just ends up looking blurry and washed-out anyway). It's easy to tell what the various objects are, and you will rarely encounter any sort of "find the pixel" type difficulties. They've upgraded the engine since "Hotel Dusk" (higher level of detail on object models, more and better textures) but the main point is that "Again" looks just fine. There is a lot of video but it is almost all in the context of flashbacks or visions which are rendered in a clever way to show you what the game needs you to see without giving everything away at once. You will not mind staring at this game for the 8 hours it will take to finish. (This was actually the first game I played on my brand-spanking-new DSiXL, and it looked great on the larger screen.)
I will be brief when talking about the plot because frankly there isn't a whole lot to talk about, which is a shame. I wouldn't want to give away what little suspense there is, so I'll just say that there was a series of murders in the past, another series of murders is occurring in the present, and all signs point to the murders having been committed by the same killer. You play the FBI agent who is responsible for solving both sets of murders by figuring out how the past and present events are connected. As one might expect, your character also has a very personal interest in solving the crimes, so there is a simultaneous exploration of the character's own backstory as he works to unravel the mystery. It's not terribly original, but with some cool gameplay mechanics and the unique art style, this could have been a very solid game; unfortunately the story fails to hold up its end of the bargain. The plot is astonishingly predictable (assuming you have ever read at least one mystery novel or watched an episode of "Law & Order"). I can virtually guarantee that you will have figured out what is really going on long before your character does and as a result all the "revelations" end up having very little shock value or emotional impact. Honestly, most of the twists and turns are so obvious that I didn't even get a sense of satisfaction every time I was proven right about what would happen next. The inevitable cheesy cliffhanger leading into a sequel is also telegraphed almost from the very beginning of the game. There is no nice way to say this: the story is mediocre at best. The plot was the most disappointing aspect of "Again" for me, not just because it was bad on its own, but because "Hotel Dusk" had a story that was better in every way.
Okay, so it looks good but the plot is pretty thin. How does it play? Well, if you've played "Hotel Dusk," you will of course recall that you spend pretty much the entire game in a first-person 3D exploration mode, breaking out only for certain manipulation-type puzzles and for the conversations. "Again" keeps both of these modes ("first-person 3D exploration" and "conversation") but draws a very clear line between them. "Again" limits the use of first-person 3D mode to a small number of specific locations (one or two per chapter). In a nutshell, the locations where you talk to people are 2D; the locations where you do stuff are 3D. This makes some sense because of the story (which has you zig-zagging all over the fictional city of Clockford) but to me it still felt like there was a lot less "there" there compared to the previous game. Then again, one could argue that in "Hotel Dusk" you spent a lot of your time just running through the hotel to get from place to place, which "Again" abstracts away into having you tap the place you want to go from a list of available locations, saving the full-blown 3D presentation for those moments when you are in a place where it actually matters. I can't really pass judgment on this decision; given that your character spends most of his time driving all over the city I think it was a logical choice. I do wish that there had been a lot more of the 3D scenes, though.
Although there is less 3D exploring in "Again" than there was in "Hotel Dusk," the way you actually go about it is very different and quite cool. The core concept is that the main character has the ability to see a place in both the present and the past at the same time, and most of the game's puzzles revolve around the notion of reconciling these two views. It's traditional first-person point-and-click adventure gaming with a "spot the difference" twist. Essentially your job is to identify the handful of key areas in each scene where the past and the present differ in meaningful ways (such as a chair being knocked over) and then modify the present scene so that it matches the past, thereby triggering visions of what really happened in that spot. It's a solid concept, not terribly original but very well executed on the DS hardware. The use of the side-by-side screens works beautifully, especially because you hold the DS like a book while playing. You see the past on one screen and the present on the other screen, and as you move around the 3D world your character is looking from the same point of view in both time periods, so for example if an object was/is in a particular location in one time but is/was gone in the other time, you see it on one screen but not the other. The "past" has a grainy black-and-white film quality to it and the total visual effect is just spot-on. Each time you "fix" an element of the present to match the way it was in the past, you are shown another short segment of the overall vision, and once you have all the segments, you are then asked to put them in chronological order which unlocks the complete vision and allows you to see what really happened. Overall, I enjoyed every single one of these scenes; the puzzles are almost all very easy but the way the scenes are put together makes up for the lack of difficulty. These sections of "Again" demonstrate the quality adventure-game craftsmanship that the developers are capable of.
Really the only negative aspect of the 3D scenes is that you have a "psychic energy meter" which is depleted each time you try to alter the wrong thing in the present. If the meter runs out, your character dies and you have to start the scene over. This only happened to me once, and the game auto-saves your progress frequently even if you forget to save it yourself, so the hindrance is minor, but it's totally unnecessary and therefore grating (kind of like the "conversation health bar" or whatever it is in the Phoenix Wright games). The punishment for getting things wrong in an adventure game is that you don't solve the puzzle and therefore you are stuck until you get it right. Adding an arbitrary "game over" mechanic for what essentially amounts to clicking on the wrong thing is kind of silly, especially if it forces the player to replay scenes that she's already watched or redo a set of static puzzles that she's already solved (the player experiences nothing new by doing this, it just artificially lengthens the game). As I said, though, the puzzles are so easy that for the most part you'll be at little risk of actually running afoul of this. I mention it only because it is a design sin and therefore ought to be called out; it doesn't end up detracting from the game in any meaningful way, but if the puzzles were actually hard, then this mechanic would quickly get very irritating.
So the good news is that the "past vs. present" scenes are a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the bad news is that you'll probably only spend about two hours of your total eight-hour play time in those fun 3D exploration and puzzle-solving scenes. You'll spend the other six hours in the "driving around asking people questions" 2D mode which is frankly not very interesting. You have a list of locations and there is one character you can talk to at each location. As you learn about additional locations they are added to the list. You don't walk around, even on a 2D map; you just see pictures of the place you're visiting and the person you're talking to, and carry on a conversation by choosing questions to ask from a short list. Calling these things "dialog trees" is perhaps being generous since most of the "trees" only go one level deep. In each chapter (which represents a day or part of a day of the larger investigation) there are a handful of different characters that you can talk to, so it feels kind of non-linear for a little while, but sooner or later you reach a point where you must do X before you can do Y before you can do Z. Bottom line, you're going to go to each of the predetermined set of locations and have all the possible conversations before you can finish each chapter. I haven't replayed the game, and don't intend to, but based on my play-through I would be shocked if there was even a single thing that could change about the story. There are a couple of scenes where you and your partner (a fellow FBI agent) will "review what you know" which is similar to the "quiz" scenes in "Hotel Dusk" where you have to pick the right facts in order to proceed. These scenes basically serve to make sure that you understand what you're supposed to have learned about the plot up to this point.
Now, if you played "Hotel Dusk" and have been paying attention to this review so far, you might be scratching your head wondering how I can criticize "Again" for having 75% of the game take the form of conversations. "Hotel Dusk" is (in)famous for containing a massive amount of dialog. All I can say is that in "Hotel Dusk" having all of those conversations was mostly fun and in "Again" they have somehow managed to make it mostly not fun. It's not painful, it's just very very bland and ultimately feels pointless. Unlike "Hotel Dusk" where the conversations actually seemed to matter to the story, you had decisions to make, and the other characters reacted to your choices (sometimes ending a conversation early if they didn't like what you said, for example) in "Again" you will definitely end up clicking on every single option and it doesn't even seem to matter what order you choose. Most of the conversational exchanges are a couple of sentences. It was enough to make me wonder if the developer got a lot of complaints about how much dialog there was in "Hotel Dusk" and deliberately decided to dumb this one down. The problem I have is not so much with the writing itself, although the writing isn't great; the problem I have is that these sections don't really feel like you are playing a game at all. It literally doesn't matter what you do except that if you don't do it, the story doesn't move forward. Your job as the player is just to click through every item on the menu. It's like traversing the world's largest phone tree except every menu just says "push 1 to get to the next menu." Every single interaction that you have with another character could just as easily have been reduced to a single information dump of "you went here and talked to this person and this is what you learned." Of course, if they had done that, the game would have been reduced from 8 hours to more like 2-3 hours. Then again, it would have been the 2-3 actually fun hours, so maybe that would not have been a bad trade-off.
To be fair, I will admit that there is a tiny bit of adventure game DNA to be found even in these sections, in the sense that there is a progression of events in each chapter; for example, quite often you have to visit certain locations to unlock new dialog options or cause characters to show up in other locations. You also have a cell phone, but it doesn't get used that often and in any case it's essentially just another "location" to visit anyway. Although you can pick up a few items, overall the use of "inventory" is quite limited; every now and then you'll need to carry an item from one area of a scene to a different area of the same scene, or get something from someone in the present to help you complete a scene in the past, but that's about it. Sometimes you can elicit a response from a particular character by showing them a photograph or item that you're carrying. By and large, however, you as the player are forced into an incredibly passive mode during the investigative portions of the game. Even by adventure-game standards, which I will admit are pretty low in this area for the most part, the dialog trees are almost always boring, repetitive, and pointless. Their only redeeming quality, therefore, is that they are so shallow, and if that isn't damning with faint praise then I don't know what is.
So there's the gameplay. Bottom line, it is about 25% cool 3D adventure / puzzle-solving and 75% boring investigation / lame clicking through endless conversations. (To be clear, I like investigation, I don't mind reading large chunks of my adventure games, and I am totally fine with elaborate dialog trees. So it is possible to include any or all of those elements in ways that I will enjoy very much. Unfortunately, this game doesn't do that. But, the 25% that is fun, is really fun, and hey, it only lasts 8 hours, so at least it's not as bad as Final Fantasy XIII, which I am told finally starts getting interesting around hour 20, about 16 hours after I gave up in despair and ran my copy through a blender.)
I would not say "do not buy this game at all," but I might say "wait until you can get it for 40-50% off, which probably won't take long." I paid the full $30 and think I would have been much less disappointed with the game if I had paid $15. It felt a lot more like a $10-$15 game than a $30 game in terms of length and content. I don't feel ripped off, because I did have some fun with the game, and my personal "minimum time per entertainment dollar" threshold is somewhere around $4 an hour, but in a perfect world I would like a longer experience than 8 hours for $30, especially when out of the 8 hours there were really only 2-3 hours of what I would call really engaging gameplay. That being said, "Again" is much, much better than "Sherlock Holmes: The Mystery of the Mummy" (which is on my short list of candidates for "worst adventure game of all time") so at least I can say with confidence that this is absolutely not the worst adventure game you could possibly buy for the DS.
In conclusion (and thank you for actually reading this far!) I would say that "Again" is just OK. For me personally, "just OK" might have been sufficient to garner a better review, if only "Hotel Dusk" hadn't been so much better in nearly every way (and if only it hadn't been so much better THREE YEARS AGO). "Again" ends with a scene that is about as close to the promise of a sequel as you can possibly get without just coming right out and showing a picture of the next game's box art. (One can only imagine what they will name it.) I hope that the sequel ends up going all the way back to the formula that made "Hotel Dusk" so good. Now that would be worth buying... again.
Just Ok
I just started this game a couple days ago. I am kind of dissapointed because after playing Hotel Dusk a few years ago, I thought this one would be even better. So far it isnt. Seems like alot of reading and nothing else. Maybe it will get better as I progress through the game.
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