Wales Interactive have established themselves as the premier publishers of Full Motion Video content. If you want to make pivotal decisions while real life people act it out, you should be paying attention to their releases. If that does appeal to you, then The Isle Tide Hotel should be near the top of your list.
The game is fairly standard for its genre, scenes play out and at critical moments the player is required to choose from multiple options to solve a conundrum or drive a narrative decision. Most are timed so there is pressure to think quickly, and almost all choices create branching stories.
In The Isle Tide Hotel, the player controls the destiny of Josh, a man in search of his daughter Eleanor. She appears to have been kidnapped and is sequestered in the Isle Tide Hotel; a place populated entirely by eccentric people.
Most of the occupants speak in cryptic sentences with emphasis put on words like ‘Verses’, ‘Terms’ and ‘bodies’ that doesn’t make conventional sense. As Josh gets deeper into the hotel the mystery unravels and side stories draw illumination on the events.
I found the performances a little pretentious at first, like the game was trying too hard to be a David Lynch movie (a director/writer already known for disappearing up his own backside). However, on subsequent playthroughs I found the lines more endearing. Rather than being wacky for wacky’s sake, the dialogue is deliberately focused on creating a world where the people within are divorced from reality. It helps that each playthrough sheds more light on the detached world of the Hotel.
A common complaint of the genre is that most choices made by the player branch out for a bit and then are funnelled back into bottleneck moments. A choice, often, means just dictating a reaction to an inevitable event instead of a meaningful change to the story. I am happy to say that, after a couple of playthroughs, The Isle Tide Hotel eschews this formula in favour of choices leading to wildly different story outcomes. I don’t want to spoil any of the results, but I can say that was very pleased that every moment seemed to count.
This replayability and diversity in outcomes leads to The Isle Tide Hotel being one of the strongest outings from Wales Interactive’s stable. Each time felt like I was unravelling a new layer to Eleanor and Josh’s story, while getting to see new scenes.
Obviously, whether someone should buy this game will be down to their tolerance of FMV games – but Isle Tide Hotel, alongside Five Dates and The Complex, is the most compelling argument for people to put aside their prejudices and give them a chance.
Conclusion
One of the best thought out FMV games by Wales Interactive, a must play for fans of the genre and good entry point for newcomers.
Become a Patron!This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
