Review for Isle Tide Hotel

When talking about choice-driven games, there seem to be two extremes. There are games where your decisions affect nearly everything: the story's progression, characters, and even what ending you will receive. There is also the game that puts less emphasis on choice, where characters may behave differently towards you depending on what you do, but the story still moves linearly. The Isle Tide Hotel is the former, presenting a range of scenarios and options to inspire multiple playthroughs while providing an intriguing story and characters you will grow to care for each time you play. 

The Isle Tide Hotel, created by Wales Interactive and Interflix Media, puts the player into the shoes of Josh Malone, who is infiltrating said hotel to rescue his daughter, Eleanor. He finds a cult that harbors guests who are varying degrees of wacky, which tests the player to see whom they should trust to help get Eleanor out of danger and by what means they can do so. The zany veils slowly peel away as you play the game to find the underlying logical tale. There are themes of individualism, purpose, and what lengths people will go to achieve their goals while retaining or shedding their humanity. 

Depending on the choices, you can unravel the hotel's mystery in one go. However, the entire context behind the various characters and their motivations requires multiple playthroughs. Given that the game takes less than two hours to complete -- plus the ability to skip cutscenes you have already watched initially -- this is not a tedious task. You can learn more about Josh Malone himself or more about the hotel's guests, its rules, or the antagonist behind it all. Multiple scenarios and paths open for you depending on your decisions in the first few minutes. 

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The presentation helps establish the game's underlying tone and atmosphere well. The whole game is in full-motion video, meaning the graphics are real-life recordings with real people and locales. The choice of location is interesting, showcasing the Isle Tide Hotel's exterior with classical architecture, hiding the abnormalities inside. For example, one room contains a gypsy that gives a glimpse of your future. Another has a video game addict who tries to justify getting lost in his virtual world. What lies inside really encourages exploration to see what the hotel masks. 

Given that the game uses full-motion camerawork, the actors voice and display their characters well. Everyone in the cast is professional, and their performances are outstanding. Josh Malone's grounded yet empathetic attitude is akin to a foreigner traveling to a strange, unexplored country when conversing with seemingly bizarre hotel residents. There are moments where sudden cuts between scenes in the same room are noticeable and somewhat abrupt, but this is minor.

Another minor critique is the lack of music variety. Most of the game is silent, with only a few tracks that stand out, like Eleanor's theme with somber piano notes. Still, when they do surface, the musical themes are used appropriately.

The gameplay is akin to something like a choose-your-own-adventure. You do not control the character. Instead, you click on dialogue boxes that dictate what Malone will do, say, or choose. Some of these decisions are time-sensitive, though there is an option to turn the timer off called "Streamer Mode." Since there are so many choices, a directory in the main menu keeps track of everything you have done on every playthrough, such as rooms visited and items procured. It ensures you are never repeating yourself or forgetting certain information. There aren't many puzzle segments; those that emerge include identifying a specific character using written clues and navigating a maze of identical rooms. Other occasions reward you for paying closer attention to what other characters say to recite the information later. One path, in particular, had a couple of opportunities I missed or failed, and I'm still wondering what I did wrong or what I could have done differently. There were also, playing through the same scenario twice, a couple of randomly generated events, though this was not a prevalent or annoying element.

The Isle Tide Hotel is a game that initially seems chaotic and nonsensical. But if you are willing to go into the depths and dig deep, you will find a remarkable narrative that asks you how far you will go to fulfill the purpose you set yourself out to accomplish. The branching paths and excellent character performances reinforce this theme and create an experience you will want to play repeatedly to either piece together the whole story or see how outcomes might have been entirely different.