The Dink Network

Hotel of the Middle Night

Holy hell, that is gory. It's your job to find out
August 12th, 2009
1.02
Score : 4.3 tolerable
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metatarasal
Bard He/Him Netherlands
I object 
When the hotel of the middle night came out back in late '08 I tried playing through it, but I quickly became bored with it and gave up. Now, almost a year later, Skull convinced me to give it another try. Unfortunately this new playthrough still left me disappointed, and I'd probably not finished it either if it wasn't for the walkthrough.

The main question that I had when I played this game was 'why?' There doesn't seem to be any logic involved in the story. You complete a number of tasks in a very specific order without any hint on what you should be doing next. In practice this means you are walking aimlessly through the DMOD touching, hitting, pushing and talking to everything until you hit upon a cutscene somehow. Not my idea of great gameplay. Also there seemed to be hardness randomly distributed over some of the interior rooms.

The idea of this DMOD was to be scary, but unfortunately the gameplay takes away a lot of the atmosphere. If you're looking for a completely random object that will progress the story for 15 minutes in a world completely devoid of hidden danger you're not going to feel afraid anymore, no matter how good the sound effects are. Because the sound effects are good. While I didn't feel particularly afraid I did think the sound effects and music were used very well, they fit in perfectly with this type of DMOD.

Another thing I was annoyed by is the apparent lack of a savemachine. Why, oh why can't I find a savemachine? According to the readme it has one, but I couldn't find it. So, when I finally got to the final boss I had 5 seconds to do 'something'. Again no clue was given what I needed to do, so I just started talking, pushing, hitting and touching things. But I didn't manage managed to do exactly the right thing in five seconds. So, I get killed and need to start all over again. Am I glad there is a walkthrough next time.

One of the good things of this DMOD is its story. There were people with mistaken identities, and people who you thought were dead that turned out to be very much alive or at least not very dead. I especially liked the last cutscene The only thing missing is the link with the actual gameplay. This means that the story that you see consists out of random bits of information that are linked together in a random order until they are explained in the last cutscene. A logical order would have done great things for the story. Oh and the story is a bit too complicated for the size of DMOD as well. I would have chosen a slightly more modest story.

So, if you compare my review with the other reviews on this side I might come around a bit harsh. But really I can't see how walking aimlessly until you somehow hit upon something new is fun, or scary for that matter. All in all I was more frustrated then anything else. It might have a good story, but that's like putting bad food in a fancy wrap. I liked the wrap.

Final verdict:

4.3