Hollywood 61 (Hands-On) (Nintendo 3DS) Preview

Hollywood 61 is a mystery puzzle game with a ‘film noir’ vibe. Revealed as a game tuned towards being an interactive movie in E3 Press material, the short demo seemed to be going in that direction; as long as you are thinking B-movie rather than a blockbuster that matches up to its name. A few dialogue scenes with a man that looked like a cardboard standee, popping out from the background in 3D - quite an interesting style - set the slightly cheesy tone. Sadly, just as it felt like it was beginning, the demo came to an abrupt end.

The short stint of Hollywood 61 on offer went from dialogue scene to an impressive 3D cinema front, before bizarrely diverting into a puzzle asking you to divert light at 90-degree angles, via mirrors, to open a lock. It perhaps wasn’t the wisest choice of puzzle to focus on in this instance, as it didn’t really give any indication of what the 3DS is capable of achieving. Hopefully it is one of the earlier puzzles and there is more exciting stuff to come.

The scene that followed completion of the puzzle certainly seemed to imply that there is indeed more on the horizon. Upon entering an auditorium, the player was confronted by a dead man hanging from a noose, with strange markings strewn across the red curtains covering the cinema screen behind him. The simple puzzle here was to use the analogue slider, adjusting your viewing angle to find out what the markings meant. A tilt to the left, then the right, revealed a chilling message: ‘YOU’RE NEXT’. Uh oh. This section showed off the 3D effects in much better fashion, as genuine depth made itself apparent as you moved your view. Alas, there was no more, as this was where the demo finished.

Extra Thoughts

Ubisoft has already brought numerous puzzle adventures to the Nintendo DS and Wii consoles, with the likes of Broken Sword: The Director’s Cut and Crime Scene Investigation both proving to both critical and sales successes in the Western world. Now the publisher is eager to jump onto the Nintendo 3DS bandwagon as quickly as possible, showing that the 3D effect does not merely have to be used to add depth to the playing field, but can also be incorporated to good effect for the creation of special puzzles. This time, rather than being developed by UK-based Revolution Software, of the US team at Telltale Games, Hollywood 61 appears to be an internally developed piece of software and from the early glimpse at Nintendo’s special event it looks like there is still quite a lot of work to be done before this can sit comfortably alongside games such as nintendogs + cats or Pilotwings Resort on store shelves.

As stated earlier, the main character’s visual appearance makes him look somewhat like Tex Murphy, in other words an old gumshoe-style detective, the sort that proudly sports a long, pale brown trench coat, except in this particular time period he dons a thin black tie and black suit combination. Throughout there is a mix of 2D cel-shading and realistic human character, but unfortunately the two styles do not completely gel and the lip-syncing for characters is so out of time that is looks extremely odd listening to the (decent) voice-over work and watching the lead character randomly jiggle his lips around as he talks about how an old cop friend asked for the player’s help in an investigation to uncover a serial killer. On the puzzle front, the light-based one on offer that Mike spoke about earlier, whilst completely irrelevant in terms of 3D use, was a nice little touch-screen brain-teaser to ease players into the proceedings, whilst the use of the 3D field of vision to uncover the hidden message was extremely reminiscent of the recent DSiWare release from Good Feel, Tales in a Box (or Looksley’s Line Up as it is known in the US), except rather than using the head-tracking features of the internal DSi camera to change perspective, the analogue stick on the 3DS could move the in-game camera’s position around. With 150 conundrums to tackle in total, there is definitely some strong potential for a highly engaging adventure here that will appeal to fans of the Professor Layton series, but since only such a tiny amount was revealed, judgement will be reserved until further down the line.
Adam Riley, Senior Editor.