Hotel Dusk is an adventure game very much from the Japanese "visual novel" tradition rather than the American "point-and-click" tradition. It has a very engaging story-line and well-developed characters. Unfortunately, I thought most of the puzzles were poorly conceived, and wandering through the halls of the hotel in the 3D navigation sections was tiring. Some of the puzzles were logical, but there were more than a few that seemed very difficult and I was forced to grab a walkthrough. I would have much preferred a navigation system similar to Phoenix Wright or Broken Swortd with pre-rendered backgrounds. The 3D navigation of the hotel has blurry textures and adds very little to the game.
The story is extremely linear. Many times I spent my time wandering around just to find the one next person I had to interact with to get the story to the next section. In many situations the identity or location of that person isn't obvious based on what you did before. While all adventure games with no branching paths suffer from limited replay value, this one has even less due to the time it takes to get through the puzzles.
Hotel Dusk has great art direction and a terrific story but fans of the adventure game genre might be disappointed by the lack of depth to the gameplay.
