1. The Norwood Suite is a game where you run errands for people in an old hotel. Don't worry; it is more about the hotel and people than it is the errands.
2. The work of David Lynch obviously influenced this quite a bit. Specifically, I have a feeling developer, Cosmo D, has spent a good deal of time watching Twin Peaks. The Norwood Suite has a similar humorously off-beat but always creepy atmosphere. Everyone seems to have secret motivations and desires. There's a special focus on sound. There's a hotel. It all follows.
3. The setup here is your boss drops you off at the Norwood Hotel and sets you off on a vague task. The twist is that the Norwood Hotel has a rather odd history and since, for whatever reason, you look like you work there, other people are going to give you vague tasks and you are going to have to do those too.
4. The graphics are stylishly low-poly but w/ some rather loud textures add a bit of an edge to set The Norwood Suite a head above many games that go for a similar look. It is not going to make your GPU scream or anything but it's still a very striking game due to its art design. I found myself struggling not to blow up my social media w/ ten thousand screenshots.This is a thing that happens sometimes.
5. There is an extent to which this feels almost like an interactive soundtrack as much as a game. Choppy, beautiful music blares from speakers everywhere throughout the hotel grounds and it melts together as you walk from location to location. NPC speech is represented by staccato notes from various instruments and adds another layer to everything. It works really well and you begin to associate songs w/ locations and instruments w/ people very quickly.
6. As far as gameplay, you walk around, talk to people, figure out what sort of problems they are having and then solve them. It's very much inspired by point and click adventure games but much less involved from a puzzle-solve perspective.
7. The Norwood Suite draws you in by opening up more of the hotel for each task you complete and each new thing you find. There's just so many off-kilter curios scattered about that just getting to see more is an enticing enough reward to keep you going.
8. Certain tasks have other prerequisite tasks before you can get to them but you are allowed a good amount of flexibility in what order you do things. Simply going off and finding all you can find at the start of the game is as good of a strategy as trying to complete each of the tasks int he order you get them. This goes a long way towards making the Norwood Hotel feel like an actual place rather than a level of a video game.
9. There's a few places you can get hung up or lost but The Norwood Suite is not really meant to be a challenge. The solution to every problem is to just keep looking. It is a metaphor for life.
10. There is what at first seems to be an oddball cluster of guests and employees there but getting deeper into things you begin to see how everything is interconnected. Things get more stilted and unreal as the night progresses but always in a way that's believable w/in the game's setting. This gets back to the Twin Peaks influence I mentioned way back in the old days of this review.
11. Not everything about The Norwood Suite is shiny perfection. Specifically, there are some bugs and weird glitches that happen frequently enough it's worth mentioning. It seems Cosmo D is responsive to issues but they still persist to at least a degree. I didn't find anything game breaking but I did have to trigger something twice to advance the plot at a critical point and wound up spinning my wheels quite a bit before figuring this out. The half hour or so I spent wandering aimlessly in the meantime proved to be a very significant portion of my playtime.
12. Also, the ending is kind of abrupt and random. You can tell you are building up to the big conclusion but what happens just doesn't seem to have anything to do w/ anything. I don't need everything wrapped up in a neat package but I didn't feel like there was any kind of foreshadowing at all to what occurs in the final scene.
13. Really, I only mention flaws in The Norwood Suite in order to maintain my thin veneer of objectivity. This game is great and I love it. I love it! It builds a real sense of place w/ its unique setting and atmosphere and feels like something special from the moment you start playing. Pick it up. It is more than worth the asking price and the time you will spend playing it.
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