Excellent Interactive Book!
Gameplay: The basic gameplay is simple enough. Some may need some time to get used to holding the DS sideways, but it's fine for me. The DS is truly utilized well, so you can expect a lot of stylus movement and some button pressing (and even closing the DS on purpose).
This is an adventure game, so you can expect to be moving through a lot of places. However, the hotel is not that large, so random wandering does not often poke its head (twice for me).
There is a lot of dialogue in the game. That certainly is not a bad thing as I like to read conversations. The problem comes in when you are faced with a choice between two things to say. Pick the wrong one and the person will get mad at you (and the choices are sometimes almost identical). A skip to the choice feature would have been very nice here so one does not have to reread the whole thing if you screw up. The best counter is to save your game, which fortunately takes almost no time at all.
Graphics: The graphics of this game are certainly unique, but in a good way. They really go great with the game. It really looks like pictures taken out of a good mystery book. My one complaint here is that one will slowly see a lot of recycled movements. Each character only has about 15 movements and with all of the dialogue, some can get old quickly.
Sound: Most of the time, I listen to my own music while playing games, especially on the DS. This is the first DS game EVER that I cannot turn the sound off for! I don't quite know why... the tunes are background normally, but they have a nice beat to them. All I know is that I could not turn off the sound, giving it the coveted 10/10.
Value: This game falls into the same problem as movies and books; if you have a good memory for them (like I do), you can probably remember the whole story, destroying the value. HOWEVER, the creaters seemed to have thought about this. There seems to be some bonus for beating it a second time, and not everything is necessary (I didn't do anything with the vending machine the first time around or get into room 220), so you can go back a second time and watch the pieces fall into place (and catching plenty of things you missed the first time) while you try to find out how to use items that you did not finish the first time through. Also, some of the characters, especially Hyde, Louie, and Mila, are so great that you may want to re-beat the game just to listen to all of them again. BTW, each run through takes about 30 hours, give or take a few hours based on your skill level and want to explore (Hyde has an opinion on just about everything, so just about every object is clickable!).
Tilt: This is a unique game that really pulled out all of the stops. It is one of the few to have been so great that I didn't want to do anything else the entire time. In fact, I would rather be re-beating it than writing this! That alone puts it as a 10/10. I wish 11/10 was possible as it has plenty of other excellent strengths, such as mostly destroying the random exploration that plagues too many adventure games, excellent characters (especially Mila), and a very engaging story that will have you wondering:
Is it denial or the Nile?
Thanks for reading! :)