You can add Last Window: The Secret of Cape West to the sizeable list of great adventure games on the Nintendo DS. Last Window is a direct sequel to Hotel Dusk – if you’ve played that game you’ll know what to expect, only more of it, and if you haven’t then I highly recommend you grab a cup of coffee and play one of the most atmospheric and well written stories in gaming.

Kyle Hyde arrives home from being on the road as a travelling salesman only to find that his apartment block, Cape West Apartments, is being sold and he has to move out in less than two weeks. It turns out he’s also been on the wrong side of his boss a few too many times and gets fired as well. But before he moves out of these apartments it looks like they might have some secrets that Kyle would desperately like to uncover. The story takes place a year after the events of Hotel Dusk, and the investigation has much more personally at stake this time for Kyle.

The style of the game is very similar to Hotel Dusk – it has exactly the same game engine in fact. You hold the DS sideways (left or right handedness is supported) and interact with the touch screen to move Kyle around. When you’re walking around Cape West Apartments a top-down map shows on the touch screen and your forward view shows on the other screen in basic 3D. Touching a spot on the map moves Kyle in that direction. There are a few action buttons on the touch screen too – one allows you to talk to a person who is nearby, another to look closer at interesting objects, another to look at your notebook or game settings, another to open doors and another to look at your inventory.

Kyle and other characters are depicted in beautiful pencil sketches that also have a few different animations to indicate emotions or responses. The story takes place in 1980 and the sketches (as well as the 3D art style) give everything a noir feel that along with the beautiful, wistful music set up an atmosphere that matches Kyle’s underlying sadness.

A few characters return from Hotel Dusk. One is Ed, Kyle’s boss and the owner of Red Crown, a purveyor of all sorts of strange items that Kyle is supposed to sell door to door. Rachel, Ed’s personal assistant, is still Kyle’s main contact at Red Crown, and she helps with digging up information that Kyle might need. Kyle’s job at Red Crown might look like sales, but his real job is investigating and finding missing items for people. Tony the struggling musician also returns, but other than one other brief appearance from a character from Hotel Dusk the rest are all new, and there are quite a few of them in Cape West.

In the course of the story Kyle interacts with all the inhabitants of the Cape West apartments, including the people who run the coffee shop on the ground floor, making the apartment block seem especially real. Each character is drawn with great attention to detail and their characters come through in the little mannerisms in the animations. The dialogue is also uniformly of a very high standard. Kyle is his usual gruff, no-nonsense self, and each other character talks in a way that goes perfectly with their pencil-sketch drawings.

Last Window’s plot is complex but fascinating. The game took me 15 hours to complete, and most of the time was spent moving the plot along. There is the odd puzzle that will completely stump you for a while (and some that are deviously clever), and I felt frustrated every now and then with not knowing what to do. My tactic in these moments was to go around knocking on doors until someone steps out and chats as these conversations usually advance the plot. Everything is done in a very linear fashion – the game won’t let you leave your room if you haven’t done something you should have in your room, for example. If your pager beeps then the game won’t let you do anything until you’ve gone to your phone and called Rachel up. So most of the time you know exactly what you should be doing and why, but every now and then I was a bit lost, only to recover after a bit of trying various things.

The game can be a little harsh at times – I must have got the Game Over screen at least 10 times while playing because of something I did wrong. Fortunately you can choose to retry and it puts you back just before you went wrong. Even wrong turns have great dialogue so it’s never that much of a penalty to do the wrong thing, and it adds to the gameplay knowing that at any point a wrong choice might give you a Game Over screen. At the end of each game day the game briefly recaps what happened in the day (along with some questions for you) and a new chapter begins. As you complete each chapter you also unlock chapters in the Last Window novel, which is a great way to remember what you’ve done and to understand the intricacies of the plot better. The game is told in the first person (you are Kyle Hyde), while the novel is a third-person narrative, so it’s told from a slightly different perspective and well worth reading.

There are seldom games that have as much atmosphere as Last Window: The Secret of Cape West. The pencil graphics, the sometimes uplifting, sometimes sad music, the little events in the game such as just sitting down to eat a good plate of food at Sidney’s diner or the little billiards competition, the great characters and intriguing setting and plot all combine to create a really unique game that is more akin to reading a favourite mystery novelist than normal videogame fare. I highly recommend it for those who like reading, or those who enjoy a good mystery or puzzle-solving, and, of course, for those who like well made videogames.

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