The Isle Tide Hotel review
:: LOW TIDEPrice: Free
Version: 1.0
App Reviewed on: iPad Pro
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Wales Interactive has fully entered journeyman status in the world of FMV game development, putting out the vast majority of these kinds of games I've encountered on the App Store. I have said before (and will say again) that I find their releases most successful when they tighten their scope and lessen their stakes below "saving the world" or "solving the conspiracy" levels and focus on telling a more grounded story. The Isle Tide Hotel absolutely does not do this and suffers for it, and on top of that it contains performances and happenings that feel little more than strange just for sake of it.
Every body to the hotel
In The Isle Tide Hotel you play an absent father investigating the disappearance of his teenage daughter. Evidence to her whereabouts point you to a mysterious hotel that contains a lot of strange staff and guests. I don't want to spoil anything about the actual story as that's the core of these games, but almost immediately you can see through what is going on and it's very predictable genre schlock.
Instead of more typical FMV games, The Isle Tide Hotel is somewhat nonlinear, giving you some options as to how to investigate. There are--of course--dialog options to choose in the midst of video clips, but also times where you are in a room and can choose where to move to, who to talk to, etc. These are somewhat limited segments of the game, though, which helps prevent this already slowly paced game from feeling even slower.
Too many pieces
By the time I got through The Isle Tide Hotel, I found myself somewhat bewildered at what had happened. Everyone in this game has a strange manner about them and says or does at least one thing that doesn't really seem to make sense. The sense I get from the game is that I'm supposed to search for meaning behind these occurrences by playing the game again, but I am not curious in the slightest to go back through the game and figure things out.
Although I think it's nice for a game to be built around replayability, having a story-based game require you to replay it to understand the story is a step too far. I'm of the opinion that games with branching storylines should tell complete stories across all of its branches instead of just offering a lot of incomplete pictures that you have to piece together yourself.
Don't trust the tide
Part of the reason I am not interested in what might lay behind other playthroughs of The Isle Tide Hotel is because of the game's strange pacing that makes what is generally a pretty short game feel like it takes forever. Beyond that, though, I've been down this path before with games from this developer and have not really found the satisfaction I was looking for.
The game does itself no favors either, as it doesn't actually encourage players to replay the game outside of showing some menu items that aren't revealed unless you figure out how to unlock them with replaying. There's no hint of how significant these items might be, nor does it even plant questions into your mind about what you might want to uncover. If there was something in The Isle Tide Hotel that suggested what I might be able to figure out I may be more enticed to start the game again, but my assumption based on past experiences is that there's a reason for this: there isn't all that much to actually discover.
The bottom line
The Isle Tide Hotel is an FMV game that is just trying to do too much beyond what FMV games are good at. It adds more video gamey elements that clash with having human actors performing them, doesn't allow its actors to act like humans, and seems designed solely around the idea of someone playing it repeatedly to see everything that is in it. To all that I say "no thanks."