Import: The Last Window

I imported a game last week.

The Last Window: The Secret of Cape West is the Japan and Europe only sequel to 2007's Hotel Dusk: Room 215, which was released in the US. It again stars Kyle Hyde, and the game's story takes place a year after the first game.

The game play is exactly the same as in Hotel Dusk. The player moves Kyle around on the touch screen while holding the DS like a book, and Kyle's dialogue displays in a text box on the left screen while he either manipulates puzzles on the right screen or talks to other people. I enjoy the game play, but to be honest, there isn't a lot of it. Most of the time, you talk to tenants and make sure you pick the right questions to ask or answers. When you do solve a puzzle, it is either baby easy or pretty obtuse (getting the key out of the music box took me forever to figure out).

Where the game shines, though, is in the narrative, and more specifically, it's presentation. No, I do not mean the graphics - while I really do enjoy the "Take On Me" music video art, what I love is the writing. Kyle is very well written as a grizzled ex-cop, who doesn't really have a knack for sales, which is his current job. The other people who live in his apartment building (the eponymous "Cape West") are all well written as well. The game does a good job of making them all seem like normal people, while slowly revealing more sinister secrets about a few of them as time goes on. It also handles misdirection well; I had completely read one particular person to be a murderer, and I wasn't even close. It really does read like a good, pulpy detective novel (which, when written well, I genuinely enjoy).

The story ties into the first game in subtle ways, as well. Nile was a group of criminals that Kyle was investigating on the side in the first game, and were a big reason why he had quit the police force two years before the events of The Last Window. They eventually pop up in this game, and it all makes sense why. The story stands on its own, but has callbacks to the first game, and even some foreshadowing that I didn't realize was until much later (a painting hanging on one of the tenant's walls). All the little touches to the narrative impress me and I wish more games were capable of it.

The first quarter of the game, though, is pretty boring. You spend a lot of that time doing mundane things like paying rent and talking to all the tenants. I honestly can't remember what a lot of it was. It's worth getting through, though. Once the story proper picks up, the game becomes tough to put down.

The Last Window makes me very sad, though. It wasn't released in America mostly because it didn't sell well in Japan or Europe, and I don't think the first game did very well in the States anyway. This type of game should do well here, if only the right audience had access to it. Like I said before, the game is basically a mystery novel - which sell very well in this country. If more people were exposed to it, I'm sure we'd be seeing many more games of its ilk. Unfortunately, probably the only place where it could get notice would be on Apple devices, and it would probably cost too much for most people to pay attention to it and I'd also never have a chance to play it because I hate those things. I wish gamers would give off-the-wall stuff like this a chance. I know people who like to both play video games and read; there is no reason why they shouldn't give Hotel Dusk and The Last Window a shot. CING, the creators of Hotel Dusk/The Last Window, went out of business a year or two ago. It seems like Kyle Hyde's story was meant to be a trilogy, and we'll never get to see how it ends.

Hopefully America's gaming market matures, so I don't have to import other gems like The Last Window in the future, and so developers with solid ideas don't keep going out of business.