izigame.me

"The Isle Tide Hotel" is an interactive movie with an interesting premise, an initially confusing but then pretty captivating mystery to unravel, decisions that radically change the flow of the story, and some minor annoyances like occasional continuity issues and poor pacing.
1. Story & Setting
Your daughter was captured by a mysterious, cult-like group of people. You infiltrate a remote hotel where they congregate, blend in, talk to the guests, search their rooms, and try to find your daughter. The tone is generally light-hearted, with the occasional streak of absurdist humor, but without going into comedy territory. There are also moments of suspense and drama, and the story brushes some serious, darker topics as well.
The initial experience can be confusing, because the protagonist poses as a member of the "cult" and thus cannot ask direct questions about matters a member is supposed to know. Additionally, the "cult" uses everyday words to describe specific concepts of their beliefs, which will lead to misunderstandings until you've "cracked the code" of their terminology - which may take 1-2 playthroughs. I usually like games that let players figure things out by themselves, but didn't really enjoy my first hour with the game - it was giving me too little information to work with, and the slow pacing didn't help. But as I unveiled more of the mystery and spotted more clues in the conversations, my appreciation grew.
I'm happy that I stuck with the game. Not only is the main premise intriguing, it also gets explored in various ways that I found captivating and thought-provoking. While the premise itself isn't terribly original, I would consider this game one of the better products that use it, the writers did manage to give it their own spin.
2. Gameplay & Mechanics
As usual for interactive movies, gameplay consists of making choices like where to go, which area to investigate, or what to say in a conversation. There aren't any quick-time events, but many choices are on a timer - which can thankfully be turned off in the settings, if you prefer a more relaxed style of play.
Pretty early on, the story branches into 3 short, separate plots, each of which leads to two (or more) different endings depending on your choices. This design felt a bit too transparent and formulaic to me, but that didn't affect my enjoyment much. Player agency is commendably high for an FMV game, as the story can develop in various completely different ways. The game also tries to keep track of your past decisions and encounters, which affect later dialog or the presence of other characters.
Gameplay includes a few "puzzles", but they are so easy that I'm reluctant to even call them that. They feel a bit superfluous and tacked-on. One of them is a small maze of almost identical rooms with illogical connections between them - it's known for decades that these are more annoying than fun. I appreciate that the developers tried to enhance the gameplay with puzzles, but in order to actually have a positive impact on the game, they would have needed more elaboration - and definitely more imagination than implementing yet another maze.
3. Graphics & Presentation
The filming is generally competently done, and the game includes 4k footage as an optional free DLC - very nice! On the negative side, several continuity errors made it past the cutting table. These thankfully don't affect the plot, but they are visible enough to make the game feel unpolished - e.g. a key in a key cabinet suddenly appearing and disappearing between cuts, or characters not quite maintaining the same position and expression upon changes of the camera perspective.
The location was very well chosen. I found the environments visually interesting, and full of little details that made them feel lived-in.
I wasn't too fond of the acting, though that seems to be mainly a problem of the script and the direction, rather than the actors' skills. When an emotional scene is called for, the actors can usually handle that - they just rarely get the opportunity. The protagonist in particular spends most of his time showing confusion or consternation. The slow pacing of many scenes exacerbates this issue.
Another problem is that many actors visibly overact certain mannerisms. This was probably done deliberately as these mannerisms are clues for the player, but I don't think that this was a good choice. For one, players who don't recognize them as clues will simply perceive them as bad acting. Two, for players who _do_ understand their purpose, they feel so on-the-nose that they break immersion. I would have preferred more clues in the dialog and notes, so that the mannerisms could have been kept more subtle, i.e. something that an observant player will still notice and appreciate but which isn't essential for understanding the goings-on. In other words, it feels like the actors intentionally overacted certain parts of their performance to make up for the relative scarcity of other clues, and I don't think that worked well.
The sound work was generally professionally done. Music is used sparsely, but accentuates the mood fittingly when it's present.
4. Usability & Accessibility
The game provides sliders for volume and brightness, as well as standard selectors for resolution and display mode. Subtitles cover 11 languages and are customizable in size, color, and background, which is great for accessibility. Also much appreciated is a toggle for switching off the timer during timed decisions. Unfortunately that's all the settings there are, but I believe an interactive movie can get away with that.
The game can be played with either mouse or keyboard (or both), another plus for accessibility. Unfortunately though, the respective keys are very far apart (from arrow keys to tab) and cannot be rebound. So while I appreciate the developers' attention to accessibility features, there is still room for improvement.
Very importantly for an interactive movie, scenes that you have already seen can be skipped (after one complete playthrough). The implementation is not perfect, though, as scenes are sometimes considered "unseen" even if there's just one context element different, such as the protagonist having a different starting position in the room, or another character being present in one short cut within a much longer scene. I believe a smarter handling of this feature, such as allowing players to unconditionally skip scenes that just show the protagonist moving from one spot to another, would be possible - but I appreciate that the the feature itself is present.
There is only one save state, and the game keeps overwriting it automatically, you cannot save manually. A "chapter select" function is provided, but is hidden in a fairly large conversation tree and needs to be discovered first.
While I didn't encounter any crashes or gamebreaking bugs, the game could have used a bit more polish to fix the continuity errors. There's also a "photo diary" that tracks your experience across all playthroughs, which is a nice idea, but the photos did not seem to unlock reliably, or only under specific conditions that left me wondering why they wouldn't unlock under others.
5. Conclusion
Properly assessing this game is tricky. If you (like me), end up liking the premise and how the game spins it into stories, then you may appreciate the game as much as I did. But if you don't like the premise, then the game might feel like a confusing mess. The "problem" is that the game deliberately leaves the premise unclear at first, and I don't think I should spoil it either. But this means that game will probably get lower review ratings than it deserves, simply because the portion of buyers who expected/wanted something different will be relatively high.
Personally, I think it's worth a shot and I would definitely recommend it, but be aware that it might be a bit of a gamble.