The Isle Tide Hotel is not a hotel. At least, not in the conventional sense. It is a gorgeous building that, every three years, plays host to the Verse - a collective of odd individuals with grand personalities and strange mannerisms. You play as Josh, an estranged father whose daughter has been taken by the Verse, and must infiltrate the organisation to save her. Making this more complicated is the fact that the Verse is a verifiable cult with odd ‘etiquettes’ to follow and secrets that are so juicy they wouldn’t feel out of place in a hot-topic Netflix drama.
As an FMV game, gameplay is limited to what can reasonably be filmed. Much of it boils down to picking dialogue options and choosing what the main character does. Unfortunately, this does make proceedings feel rather stilted at times - you’ll be forced to wait awkwardly as actors wait for invisible timers to elapse or sit through seven slightly different variations of Josh running from one door to another. There’s also something incredibly uncanny about being presented with a room of five characters to choose between, with them just standing still in the background as if sprites in a traditional video game. Overall, there’s an undeniable clash between the FMV direction and the puzzle/adventure ideas being presented here.
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One memorable scene forces you to either punch the silent doorman three times in a row or refuse to punch him three times in a row - any combination of punching and refusing will start the entire sequence over again. It doesn’t feel natural and is a noticeable low point in any playthrough that encounters the scene. While repeat playthroughs mercifully let you skip scenes that you’ve seen previously, many of these scenes are just slight variations of each other anyway.
Thanks to these problems, I was dangerously close to bouncing off the game after unlocking the first ending, but a twinkle of intrigue kept me pushing forward. Turns out, multiple playthroughs are necessary to get a modicum of worth out of The Isle Tide Hotel. Your first will be filled with mistakes, mysteries you literally won’t have a chance of solving, and likely a frustrating ending. Then you start again, forearmed with knowledge, and make better choices. As I completed more of the game, I was pleasantly surprised with just how much the branching paths actually branched - but others may well give up after their first cluttered run.
My first few playthroughs were dedicated to solving the core mystery as best as I could, and I hit a brick wall. Instead, I deviated and ended up doing something as frivolous as helping a woman win a beauty pageant - along the way, I learned more about the cult and its founder than I had in any other playthrough, which helped immensely with solving the root mysteries at play. This helps Isle Tide feel less like an interactive movie and more like a puzzle game, and the experience is far more compelling as a result.
I mentioned earlier that the Verse is filled with odd individuals. As it often goes with FMV games, this means more ham than a pig farm and an overabundance of scenery chewing. The main cast tends to keep this to a minimum, delivering solid performances that drive the story forward, with Josh (Michael D. Xavier) and Price (Jemima Rooper) being obvious standouts thanks to some powerful emotional moments and on-screen chemistry. Dr. Aniston (Georgie Glen) is another highlight, despite her very brief stint as the villain being shoved towards the end of the main story branch. The supporting cast fluctuates a little more in quality, but this is mostly as it’s filled with bizarrely characterised individuals who never get a chance to be nuanced, despite being billed as a group of people with various traumas and complex personalities. One character that pulls it off is Melissa (Jenny Galloway), whose performance as a childlike older woman is so spot-on that it crosses over into uncanny.
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.
