If you’ve already played Hotel Dusk you’ll already be able to jump into this game like donning an old pair of slippers. It’s a graphic adventure game where you hold the DS sideways like a book and explore the apartments of Cape West as main protagonist Kyle Hyde. At the start of the game you get laid off by your boss and return to your apartment to discover you and the other tenants are all being evicted due to ‘personal reasons’ given by the sour-faced live-in landlady.
The game begins innocuously enough but mysteries soon rear the head – the main one about how your father dies when he was accidentally shot during his police duties. You play the game using the stylus and move it around a plan view of the hotel to make Kyle move around. On the other screen you get a first-person view of what he can see and it’s using a combination of the map and the more detailed first-person view that you see objects and people to interact with.
And you’ll do a lot of interacting with people. If you thought Mass Effect 2 was a bit wordy wait until you get a load of this. Just as with Hotel Dusk, I think that sometimes the talky stuff with the other characters can be a little bit too indulgent when you really just want to go about exploring the place and solving some of the puzzles the game has to offer. At least the art style is pleasing with the characters animated very similar to Aha’s Take On Me video. If you’re too young to know what I mean by that, look it up on YouTube.
Harking back to the older days of graphic adventures you’ll have to find objects littered around the rooms and use them with other objects to get the results you want. Sometimes this comes down to trial and error which can be frustrating – it does help, however, that objects you can look at or interact with are highlighted when you take a closer look so you don’t have to tap on every pixel of the screen in the vain hope that you’ll discover something when you’re stuck. That’s not to say you won’t get stuck though. There are times when you seemingly don’t know what to do or where to go and the mere act of just walking into an area triggers another conversation with a tenant who may decide to go for a stroll and tell you about the bunion on their big toe before they tell you about something that may actually help you progress a little in the game.
If you’re after something similar to Professor Layton I’m afraid you won’t find it here. The game actually plays out more like an interactive novel and in fact, even unlocks the novel of the game as you play through the chapters. You can then read them again in story format to remind yourself of what you’ve been up to. If, however, you love characterisation and the odd puzzle here and there that’s more about combining objects and getting funky with your stylus than stretching your brain then this may be something that floats your metaphorical boat. Last Window gets a good 6 out of 10.
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Related: Professor Layton, Mass Effect 2