Hotel Noir

This piece of IF is in Swedish. When non-English IF is as rare as it currently is, it's a shame that quality non-English IF is even rarer.

The game is seriously underimplemented (a bathroom has three items mentioned in the room description, none of them are implemented) and the player is never quite aware what their goal is. The plot advances when the player triggers something through an unrelated action (for example (Spoiler - click to show)to get a room key you must drink a cup of coffee) so the player is left to try everything possible they can think of with no sense of purpose. To be fair I didn't have the endurance to play very far so there's a possibility that the plot picks up later in the game.

The author leads the player on a too tight rope: the commands are interpreted way too far. Examining a television makes the protagonist to turn it on, put a video in, watch it for an hour and then go to sleep - but the player just wanted a description of the television! And commanding watch video, turn tv on, sleep etc. doesn't work so the gameplay is mostly guessing which illogical action advances the game this time.

This game is in Swedish, but I'll write the review in English anyway. I played this game during a couple of hours, and had a really hard time getting anywhere after a while. There are hints provided that aren't very helpful. The amount of rooms were fairly small, and I tried a lot of random things that seemed to not help.

Finally I gave up and used txd from ztools to decompile the game and look at the strings. It turns out that there are many ways to get stuck. A couple of examples:

(Spoiler - click to show)
* The flashlight that is in the drawer in the hotel-room disappears if you don't take it before sleeping. I found the drawer after watching TV and sleeping, which made the flashlight disappear. Missing the flashlight makes the game unwinnable (unless you do trial and error in the dark cellar-room). It can still be taken though, but it is not listed as an item in the drawer.

* The card from the policeman can be taken based on a hint in the help-screen, even if the policeman hasn't presented you with the card. The card does not seem essential anyway though.

* You can give away the painting with the address of the gangster/drug-lord before showing it to the kids by his home, making that interaction impossible and the hint that it is time to go home inaccessible. Not sure if this makes the game unwinnable though per se. This is supposed to happen the other way around but it does not make much sense.


A lot of things needs to be happen in a specific order, but in many cases there is no clue to what and when. For example; some rooms have detailed descriptions of items that you cannot interact with.

All in all, I liked the descriptions and environments, but it feels unfinished and unpolished.