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Twenty years ago, your parents opened the Reed Hotel, and were mysteriously
killed shortly after. Now, against all advice, your brother has decided to re-open it...
and he's gone missing. You must explore the evil place to save him, and try to escape
with your life. What lurks in the bowels of the Hotel's basement? What secrets do the
rooms in the upper floors hold? As Kyle Reed, you'll explore from a first person
perspective. To move from screen to screen, click on green areas that appear on-screen.
Interaction is handled by the use of various icons that appear over "hot spots" or
objects, very similar to The 7th Guest. The game is divided into 8 chapters (or
"levels"). Should you die, you'll either be exited from the game or be able to restart
the previous chapter. There are multiple endings based upon your actions within the
game. It was supposed to be released episodically, one chapter per week, with a $10,000
cash prize to the first person to 'solve' the game. This structure led to some
interesting design decisions; originally, each chapter dropped you to the desk-top on
conclusion, and there was no way to save games during a level. That would have worked
fine, given the prize structure attached to the game - but as so often happens to
independent game developers, the publishers changed their mind half-way through
development, didn't provide enough funding to fix things, and when it was released,
it got seriously mixed reviews - people liked the art, the story, and the actual
gameplay, but found the fact that you got dumped to desktop, and couldn't save,
highly annoying. In a revised version, the "dump to desktop" feature is gone but you
still can't save in-level. It has a strong atmosphere of horror, a degree of humor,
and intelligently conceived puzzles in a graphic adventure in the classic mold. |
