Review | The Isle Tide Hotel - I Think We'd Like To Change Rooms
Absentee father, Josh Malone, receives an enigmatic letter compelling him to locate his estranged daughter within The Isle Tide Hotel. On the taxi ride there, the driver is tight-lipped. At the entrance, a loitering anxious young man clutches an unlit cigarette. It’s a grand English decadent manor hotel. Going in, the reception is opulent, albeit very old-fashioned. Upon ringing the bell, the ghoulish receptionist swings around. Josh requests a room but meets an icy and bemused: "It's not that kind of hotel." Josh claims to be invited by a name he strangely knows, a claim that inexplicably gains him access, but is continually responded to with an ever-present skeletal grin. Josh is directed to the lounge, leading him away from the foreboding reception area into a well-lit, pristine room adjacent to a function hall. Inside, two women engage in a somewhat trivial dispute over the colour of party balloons, forcing Josh to hastily pick a colour, despite not caring. Something isn’t right in either room, but the feeling of it goes from tense to goofy pretty fast.
Somehow the least creepy Richard Brake performance of all time.
As a full-motion videogame (FMV), The Isle Tide Hotel heavily focuses on conversational interactions with a diverse cast to uncover a very enigmatic plot in a strange setting. Its shining strength that drove me to keep playing was its storytelling and intriguing world-building. I always wanted to learn more. Josh and his sidekicks would share great little scenes of their backstory, or the hotel’s “Grand Elder” would steal a scene as an imposing presence, and just learning tidbits about smaller characters was a little satisfying.
These little things kept me going, as the tone oscillated between compelling scenes of tension and mystery with well-acted characters to moments featuring eccentric and downright grating personas. The Isle Tide is trying to hit a lot of varying beats that often feel more like tonal whiplash than Lynchian surrealism. Several characters are met by going around a filled room or hotel floors that you can approach in different orders, so you can easily wind up in scenes or with characters that feel out of place. A lot of this ends up coming off as bizarre or downright baffling, when you are jumping between a brief whimsical interaction straight to scenes dealing with some pretty horrific concepts.
I feel this guy’s pain, everyone wants a piece of me too…
I had a conclusive and satisfying first run that lasted about an hour, but what The Isle Tide Hotel doesn’t tell you explicitly is it’s meant to be played several times. There are about eight separate endings, realistically converging into three main paths, each with variations leading to good or bad outcomes. Deciphering where paths even start can be challenging, with some seemingly insignificant characters holding the key to pivotal narratives. A trivial dialogue choice can ensure you may not experience a conclusive and satisfying story on their initial playthrough. Also, skipping through scenes you’ve already played is possible but not if they have even a slightly different bit of dialogue in them. Whether it was a glitch or a frustrating game design choice, multiple scenes that were the exact same playthrough to playthrough were also unskippable making seeing all the outcomes an excruciating slog.
For the most part, all of the gameplay takes the form of sparse dialogue choices where only a few key bits of information actually affect the game. There is also a lot of examining round rooms looking for key items, and a few escape room puzzles, topped off by a climactic yet tedious maze sequence. While this sounds like a typical stock FMV affair, but the shlock and camp feel cheaper here. Nearly every scene has a timed response that causes horrendously awkward pacing in almost every line delivery. Someone will say something to you, you will pick a response and then Josh stands about for a few moments until the footage is done cycling and he speaks. This paired with the game’s realistically well-done but painfully slow pacing of interaction for moving around rooms makes the moment-to-moment pace of play full of emptiness that doesn’t add any tension.
Average British family gathering.
Cinematically there’s a slick cleanliness to everything. The cast is very good at selling the slimy upper-escalones of society, and a few character actors like Richard Brake add an air of legitimacy to the whole thing. The well-crafted costumes and décor seem to draw inspiration from Agatha Christie's vintage aesthetic but the framing echoes that of something like a Wes Anderson film. It’s very slick. Sometimes it works but other times The Isle Tide is literally too clean. When there’s meant to be a grit or a darkness to a scene or the hotel’s somewhat oppressive nature and strange clientele is trying to be emphasised it’s hard to feel scared because everything is lit and shot like a wedding photo. Even intimidating confrontations, such as those with the Grand Elder, occur in gloriously well-lit settings which dilutes the tension in the air a bit.
Despite all the several caveats, and plenty of frustrations, there was something very enigmatic about The Isle Tide Hotel that drove me to see every ending. It’s a combination of at times captivating story, performances, and setting. So if you aren’t distracted by the dialogue choices causing slow pacing, characters that drastically vary in tone and quality, or very cumbersome navigation, there’s an otherwise unique experience to be had.
