Any list of great DS games is incomplete if it does not include Hotel Dusk and Last Window. I’ve actually played through Hotel Dusk twice, about five years apart, and imported Last Window. Both are fantastic visual novel adventure games that have great characters, story, and puzzles. Unfortuately, Cing was shutdown, but some of its former members, including director Taisuke Kanasaki, have gotten together at Arc System Works to create a bite-sized adventure in Chase. It was released in May in Japan but localized by the good folks at Aksys for western consumption.
By bite-sized, I really mean it — this is about a two hour game, but, for $6, you could kind of expect that. It’s more novel than interactive adventure, and there’s really no way to fail the game other than getting too many dialog prompts incorrect or in one particular puzzle you have to select the correct object from a picture. Other than that, this is a perfect game for a quick afternoon session that you can play from start to finish with no reason to replay, at least not for a few years.
The story centers around cold case detectives Shounosuke Nanase and his up and coming assistant, Koto Amekura. Nanase has that Kyle Hyde look from the previous games and has much of his snark, too. While the game is very short, I came to like him as a character. His assistant Koto is fairly cookie-cutter, but fulfills a good purpose. One day, these two get a anonymous tip that an explosion in a hospital five years ago that killed one person and was ruled an accident was actually not an accident, but murder. As the detectives dig deeper (primarily through dialog you read through), you get into interactive scenes in which Nanase interrogates different suspects, all of whom have some kind of connection to the hospital and the event. Selecting the correct answer is simple as long as you have been reading the previous dialog, and you can also press Y at anytime to go back and read the log.
There’s honestly little more to it than that — there are no ‘walking’ interactions like in Hotel or Last where you guide your character around a building and talk to NPCs. Instead, Chase is exclusively a game about reading and selecting the right answers to push the investigation further. Before long, you reach what appears to be a satisfying conclusion to it all, but there is a very interesting twist at the end that could hint at future sequels which I would be pleased to see.
As far as presention, Chase does a great job. It has catchy, jazzy music during calmer scenes, similar to Hotel and Last, and then more ‘chilling’ music during the important interrogation scenes. Graphically, there are zero 3D effects so you can play this one with 3D mode off or on a 2DS and not miss anything. That said, and more importantly, the artwork is very well done with well animated graphics depicting character emotion in a convincing manner.
With that, let’s get to the summary…
