If you are a Nintendo DS owner, you either have already played or should go and play Hotel Dusk. It's a fantastic adventure game with an incredible story and rather interesting puzzles. A little less known is the first adventure Developer Cing made for Nintendos portable gaming machine with the title Another Code (or Trace Memory in US), that followed the same formula. Although at first glance the story in Another Code looked to be targeted at kids (mainly because the female protagonist is only 13 years old), the story got pretty scary. Most of the puzzles in the game were centered around the touch screen controls and took quite a bit of thinking outside the box to solve.


Now over 4 years after the first game, the sequel was released in Europe last week (Japan release was early this year) under the name Another Code R. The story takes place roughly 3 years after the first game, where Ashley Mizuki Roberts reunited with her father after having a rather dramatich adventure on Blood Edward Island. Of course her father being a scientist and all returned to work and left Ashley to live with her aunt for the past 6 months without ever coming home. Although she is mighty angry with him, she followed his invitation to go camping with him. Unlike the first game this game starts in a rather normal location, but starting with Ashley being robbed of her handbag, you immediately understand, that there are same strange things happening here. For example she remembers things about her coming to the same place with her mother at the age of 3 and everytime she remembers something she totally spaces out.


Like Hotel Dusk the game is very dialogue heavy with no voice acting at all, which is a bit sad because there is enough space on a DVD, but since the dialogues are well written with interesting characters, that all have some hidden secrets, it is easily forgiven. Also the movement between locations is very much streamlined, because you always move on fixed paths. This may seem a bit strange at first, but the game does a very good job of highlighting important things. Of course there are a lot of puzzles in this game, that all use the Wiimote. But instead of simple wagglemotions like in Zack&Wiki, the motion controls and the pointing of the Wiimote are often used in clever ways.

All in all the difficulty level may be a bit too low and some dialogues a bit too stretched out, but the story makes up for everything. Oh, I almost forgot about the graphics, which are gorgeous for Wii standarts. After watching the opening sequence I was already expecting the worst, but the cel-shading looks incredible in this game. Hopefully this game won't follow the same fate as Disaster: Day of Crisis (although that game was actually pretty mediocre) and not get a release in the US, but as of now there is no announcement or release date for the US market.