Last Window: The Secret of Cape West, the sequel to the beloved Hotel Dusk: Room 205 is Japanese adventure game developer Cinq’s swan song to the world as the studio filed bankruptcy shortly after completing the game. Though it was uncertain whether we would have seen a release outside Japan, fans can now rejoice over the European release. Last Window is not only Cinq’s best title to date, this is hands down the best adventure game on the Nintendo DS. We were in love with Hotel Dusk, but Last Window improves and refines that experience in every way creating a product filled with artful love and polish — it is indeed a masterpiece, like a novelist’s award-winning manuscript.
Last Window follows the footstep of protagonist Kyle Hyde, retired detective with a damaged past now salesman-slash-finder-of-things-that-don’t-want-to-be-found. The story takes place just a year after Hotel Dusk, while players don’t necessarily need to know the plot of the last title, Last Window is much more enjoyable read/played as a sequel after finishing the predecessor as a few characters make their returns and multiple references are made to the last game. Last Window plays very similar to Hotel Dusk, just likes an interactive novel, with the players holding the DS sideways like a book. Like its predecessor, Last Window takes place in one gigantic building and you will never quite leave the environment except during cut-scenes. The game is beautiful even while the 3D environment looks stale due to the technical limitations of the DS, the game shines with its 2D portrait art during conversations and that’s almost 80% of the game. The developers use a graphic novel / manga style to display portraits with their rotoscoping technique — storyboard hand-drawn emotions and gestures overlaid on top of real actors, the same technique they used at Hotel Dusk but looks a lot sharper here, with more colors and frames — it is an improvement over Cinq’s last title Again when they experimented with photo-realistic life actors which looked archaic and reminded us too much of old Tex Murphy titles, not in a good way; but Last Window achieves that perfect grainy film noir experience that never gets old even with that limited frames per character.
There’s a lot of reading in Last Window so it isn’t for the book-averse, it even has a built-in novelized version of itself after the player finishes a chapter. A novelized chapter may span hundreds of pages and take longer to read than an actual play through. We didn’t really see a point of this feature but perhaps players who don’t have enough time to sit through the whole game in one sitting (it does take 15 to 20 hours) and may have forgotten events trasnpired, will surely appreciate this feature, if they can bring themselves to read through all those text.
If anything, Last Window is well written — so well translated that it doesn’t feel like a translation, it plays and read like a Michael Connelly novel in graphical novel form. The story is filled with twists and turns and the story unfolds like an Agatha Christie’s murder mystery. Last Window’s plot is better, tighter, and more believable than Hotel Dusk for it is less about leap-of-faith coincidences –there are still coincidences in the story, but there are just less of them and they are more believable. Almost every character vital to the plot from Cape West is there for a reason and have their own agenda while hiding their shady pasts, and the pacing of how everything unfolds is just perfect in its own way of awing /surprising the player/reader without sacrificing immersion, and even with the plethora of text, Last Window never managed to be too wordy for its own good — every events and conversations that take place reveals and foreshadow something vital to the main plot.
There are a few minor gameplay improvements to Hotel Dusk as well, like letting the player click on the phone and door icon to jump to those action directly instead of walking all the way across the room, as for why this feature is only available when Kyle is reacting to a phone call or a doorbell is a mystery, we would have welcomed the ability to just click on the phone to actively make a call as well, but that is a minor complain. Since the story takes place in 1980, puzzles are fittingly designed with that era in mind, like tapes and answering machines and pagers and turning the dials of old-style TVs and radios — older players will welcome that nostalgia, a feeling that we would never quite see that era again, a time and place where we couldn’t be gotten a hold of with a cell phone and research on the Internet. Puzzles in Last Window are varied and innovative, even though we have seen a lot of them through Cinq’s other titles — the famous closing the DS to solve a puzzle from Trace Memory is found here, they are enjoyable and never get in the way of propelling the plot forward. There are multiple ways to solve some of the puzzles and there’s also a very devious puzzle in Last Window that involved the most lateral thinking in order to solve it — we definitely appreciate Cinq’s efforts here, nobody does it better. There are a lot more opportunities for game-overs in Last Window than its predecessors, which is mostly a double-edged blade. Some of them results from asking the wrong questions and wrongly interrupting conversations and the dire consequences from that feel forced, some are clever and enjoyable to experience for the player after making the wrong vital decision — frequent savings is encouraged here even though the game does manage to place you back at a fairly close checkpoint so the game never really frustrates the player enough that he can’t progress — knowing what to do is quite obvious.
Last Window is a much more straight forward game than Hotel Dusk and it spins a much more exciting plot that involves conspiracy, government corruption, murders and criminal syndicates, and along with that a heart-warming of love, reunions, change, remorse and fulfilling destinies. Its unique graphic style provides the ultimate mystery noir experience for fans of the genre and as a swan song of Cinq and probably the last great adventure on the DS platform, Last Window: The Secret of Cape West must not be missed at all, with our full recommendation tacked on.
