The Isle Tide Hotel

If you buy into the mystery and you can tolerate the obnoxious characters then you'll get more out of this than we did. But by the time we were lost in the maze, bamboozled, for what felt like an hour, we just didn't care anymore. We played it twice and got different endings and neither was worth it. Maybe there's an ending that's a banger and we just missed it. We suspect not.

The Isle Tide Hotel often tries to be too clever for its own good and it ends up harming the overall experience. It’s hard to care much about the characters because half the time you don’t know what they’re talking about, the UI keeps slowing you down and breaks momentum and pace for the game at almost every key decision, and despite offering ten different endings, you might not even make it to seeing one because the game rarely fails to grip or interest.

With its pros and cons, The Isle Tide Hotel takes its place among the alternatives that FMV game lovers can take into consideration. If you have played and liked any Wales Interactive game before, you can expect this game to offer a similar experience.

The Isle Tide Hotel is an intriguing FMV game full of sinister mysteries to solve, but the pacing early on really makes it difficult to recommend.

The conversion from tabletop to video game seems somewhat successful, and I can see how the board game has been broken down and reconfigured as a successful interactive gaming package. While it was repetitive in places I could undoubtedly see teams of four cooperating and having a joyfully fun experience throughout the realms of Gloomhaven.

The Isle Tide Hotel is an uneven game. It delivers in its goal to tell some compelling stories about very interesting people and a cult that’s up to some incredibly odd behaviour, but the inarticulate efforts to gamify the experience may prove too frustrating for those not already enamored with the concept or the genre.

Depending on the path players take and if they utilize the scene-skipping function, a run through of The Isle Tide Hotel will generally last about one and a half to two hours. The many ideas introduced in the game could've been explored more with a longer run time, but it's fairly satisfying to go back through multiple times to discover new endings and not have it take a huge amount of time. While it's not quite as creepy or deep as it intends to be, The Isle Tide Hotel offers an inspired environment to explore and engaging acting that make the title mostly worthwhile for the price.