Dusk to Dusk: The death and rebirth of the adventure game

I’ll start with a piece of very sad news. The creators of the Nintendo DS masterpiece Hotel Dusk have recently declared bankruptcy according to a post on Kotaku . But why should anyone care about an obscure, tiny Japanese studio that turned out games that interested a small minority of people? Well I believe that the genre that Cing embodied is far more important than many would think.

Released in 2007, Hotel Dusk was an interactive detective story in an evocative style. Set in a mysterious small town American motel, you played Kyle Hyde, a former police officer, who discovers that every one of the motel’s intriguing inhabitants to be connected in some way to the disappearance of his former partner. The game is based almost entirely on turning up information through dialogue and to play the game the DS is tipped to the side like a book, with Kyle on one screen and the person you’re talking to on the other, elegantly illustrated in a rotascope sketchbook style. Although not a runaway hit, as with games like Ico, Hotel Dusk showed verve and stylistic originality and has acquired a cult following with gamers looking for a somewhat different experience. Unfortunately the company’s uncompromising approach to videogame narrative has obviously taken a financial toll and so on March 1 the company tragically folded with a reported 200 million yen in debt. The biggest question that is hanging on everyone’s lips is will Last Window: Mayonaka no Yakusoku, the sequel to Hotel Dusk recently released in Japan, ever make it over to Europe?

It seems particularly tragic that this company, which started out attempting to tread a new path in game narrative with the PS2 title Glass Rose in 1997, should fail just as the point and click renaissance builds momentum. Games like Zack and Wiki, Sam and Max, and the recently released Ghost Pirates of Voojoo Island show the genre is not simply a nostalgic resurfacing but is making a full fledged come back with fresh ideas and IPs. Soon even Jane Jensen, the creator of the classic Gabriel Knight series released by Seirra, will be releasing her new work Grey Matter (published by Mamba games who, along with Tell Tale Games, are proving to be leading lights in the new point and click movement). Because its simple mechanics and emphasis on story telling over action flies in the face of next generation gaming, the suggestion is that this is a niche genre best tackled by independent studios using new digital distribution networks – networks that have seen quirky titles like Sam and Max and Machinarium become so successful. Studio Cing were more of a traditional games company, putting expensive boxed releases out into games shops to compete with the latest blockbusters, rather than using viral publicity and a strong web presence to gently grow an audience like Tell Tale Games.

That said one recent release couldn’t care less about what I’ve just said. Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain, released exclusively on PS3 on 24 February, is behemoth of a game backed with a publicity campaign and production values that are on par with any next gen release. Apparently nobody told the creator and CEO of Quantic Dream, David Cage, that this genre was next to impossible to pull of in the form of a traditional release, or at least if they did he thankfully turned up the volume of Flight of the Valkyries and continued pursuing his dream. Because, for all its visual flare and impressive cinematics Heavy Rain is essentially a very sophisticated adventure game, in which the point and click elements have been switched with Bioware style diologue trees and an interface built almost entirely around QTEs (Quick Time Events, where buttons shown on the screen have to be input rapidly by the player). Indeed, one of Cage’s biggest triumphs in the game is to make this much criticised ‘lazy’ gameplay mechanic not only functional, but exhilarating.

Perhaps Heavy Rain is an indication of the adventure genre coming of age. If Rockstar’s new game LA Noire is anything to go by game narrative could be heading somewhere very interesting indeed. Very crudely this project looks to be a mixture of Grand Theft Auto, with its open city setting a meticulously recreated 1940s LA, mixed with Heavy Rain’s complex plotting and emphasis on player choice. Each of the games cases turn around investigating crime scenes based on actual police records and have a complex variety of outcomes, based on the evidence you collect, the attitude you take to grilling witnesses or finally whether you’re able to put everything together and catch the killer. Once upon a time, when storylines in videogames were merely a loose pretext for the gameplay (Mario: the princess has been kidnapped by Bowser… again), the point and click adventure (with games like Broken Sword and Monkey Island) had a hand in bringing intelligent scripts and deep plots to gaming, enriching the entire art form. Now, when it seems that story in games is once again undergoing a radical transition, you can detect the resurgence of the humble adventure game in the background. That is why the closure of Studio Cing, one of the leading lights in the field, is such a tragedy.