Some Thoughts on The Isle Tide Hotel
As anyone that comes to this website or watches my streams knows, I am a huge fan of Full Motion Videogames (FMV). If you make an FMV title, I am guaranteed to buy and play it. In the FMV space, Wales Interactive have made a huge name for themselves, and their newest one, The Isle Tide Motel, is one of their best ones yet.
The Isle Tide Hotel starts off on a confusing note, as you see a young woman come home to her apartment, only to be drugged and hauled off for no apparent reason. This puts you in the shoes of her father, who has received a lead that his daughter might be at a place called The Isle Tide Hotel. From this point, you are propelled into a story where you are trying to find out why this hotel only opens for three days out of the year, why is your daughter here, and why do the people in the hotel keep referring to the outfits they have been wearing all year. It seems like a lot, and believe me, the payoff is amazing.
As with past Wales Interactive joints, The Isle Tidehotel has you controlling a specific character by being shown a scene, and picking things out of the scene, or you are making dialog choices that will change the outcome out of the story. Some are simple, like stating what your name is, while others, like how you enter the hotel, can drastically change how the story plays out. There are multiple endings for you here, so you can continue to come back and try different choices to see one of the several endings that are packaged in the game.
The Isle Tide Hotel is also the first game from Wales Interactive that has native versions for the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 and it does seem to make for a cleaner presentation of the game. It also looks like the developer has switched to a new back end here that made for less errors, and smoother transitions between scenes. This is the most stable of the releases up to this date, which shows that Wales is learning with each release how to handle these console releases.
About the only thing that I really have a complaint about The Isle Tide Hotel is that after this great mystery, and seemingly getting what I thought was a good ending, it seems that I actually got a rather flat average ending. Again, this isn’t a knock on the game per se, but just confusing that the ending comes off initially as being a good one, but instead, seemed to be an indifferent ending. Trust me though, everything leading up to that conclusion is really interesting and delves into some interesting points, like what does it mean to be a parent or a father.
The Isle Tide Hotel is the best FMV game released by Wales Interactive up to this point, and might be my new favorite since Bloodshore and Night Shift. It tells a compelling story, improves the visual fidelity and stability and keeps you entertained up to the very last scene. If you are looking for a fun FMV title that tells a really interesting story, this is it.
