But Thou Must!: You're gonna help these people whether you want to or not.Butt-Monkey: Louis - the poor guy just kind of gets bitchslapped by life, again and again.Boss Fight: The interrogations at the end of almost every chapter are reminiscent of this.Bookcase Passage: There's a hidden door behind the shelf in the wine cellar.Bookends: The game begins and ends with you opening a door, and centers around Kyle teasing Dunning's claims about room 215 "granting wishes".
While at first this seems like a full-on Downer Ending, the game still ends on a positive note with Kyle and Mila leaving to restart their lives, Jenny being returned to Dunning and, quite simply, all the characters being ready to take on whatever else the world throws at them with something a lot of them had given up on before then hope. Alan is still missing, and nobody has any idea where he is.
Grace is still missing, and nobody has any idea how to find her. Bittersweet Ending: Bradley's sister was murdered by Mila's father, who has been killed by Bradley in return.Ambiguously Brown: Well, there's a lot of debate on Rosa's ethnicity.Amoral Attorney: Larry Damon, Jeff's father.There is no voice-acting, but background music is on most of time and different characters and situations have their own theme-tunes.
Visually, backgrounds are in 3D and fully coloured, but the characters are in 2D and most of the time black and white. (It is a hotel, so you shouldn't wander around in the kitchen or other areas marked 'Staff Only', but usually this just gets you some angry looks. A game over can result by asking the wrong questions or by being caught doing something you shouldn't do. The game is divided into ten chapters, each culminating in interrogation of one of the characters. You move around the hotel as Kyle, pick up things and speak with other characters, asking them questions. The game can be played almost entirely with the touch-screen of the DS and, in some of the puzzles you have to solve, uses some of the more unconventional abilities of the machine (remember that puzzle in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass that took you an hour to solve? Hotel Dusk did it first, and twice).